


DarkWorld

by JuniperJones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A lot of buildings blow up, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Because of Reasons, But several characters might have been stolen from elsewhere, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, No Major Character Deaths are Permanent!, Nobody dies is a big fat lie... BUT... Nobody you're going to CARE about dies., Not a Crossover, Other, Physical Disability, Well...not permanently.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2020-10-13 21:17:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 85
Words: 342,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20589251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniperJones/pseuds/JuniperJones
Summary: Existing rather than living, accident survivor Dean is offered a job playing a Knight Of Hell Boss character in his favorite videogame 'Moondoor'. The salary, the free VR rig, the opportunity to play games for a living... where's the downside? But when an offer from Roman Enterprises seems too good to be true, chances are the gift horse is going to have very sharp teeth.##Sam was too busy gaping with shock to say anything coherent, so Gabriel dove in and took over.  “So, um, what was that?” he asked Castiel.Castiel just blinked at him uncomprehendingly, raising one hand to touch his mouth with a puzzled frown.“You and Dean,” Gabriel clarified. “What was that all about?”“Dean. Uh. Dean hugged me,” Castiel said, his expression cool but his eyes shifting awkwardly away from the cat’s penetrating glare.“With his mouth,” Gabriel drawled.Castiel patted his lips again, guiltily, but then looked defiant as he stated firmly, “Yes. He hugged me with his mouth.”##





	1. Peering down the rabbit hole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to Aidokime for the lovely portrait of Dean.

The bell on the door jangled as a petite redheaded woman entered Lil’ Beanz, bringing a waft of near frozen air in her wake. Dean looked up in surprise, mainly because the door hadn’t opened at all for several hours, and he paused the game playing on his phone on the assumption he was actually going to do some work for a change.

Yay.

“So, hey,” his co-worker Ash said brightly, stepping out from behind the counter to greet the woman with an effusive hug. Finally extracting himself, he slung a friendly arm around her shoulder and turned her to face the cashier’s station. “This is my friend, Charlie. We were at MIT together. Charlie, this is Dean.”

“Hi Dean,” she said, with a wide, disarming smile.

Dean’s eyes narrowed with vague recognition and he frowned. It took him a moment to place her face, then he drawled, “Well, slumming it a bit, aren’t you, your Majesty?” He gestured around the tired surrounds of the coffee shop. Ever since the Starbucks had opened in town, the independent coffee house had been struggling too much to even bother with appearances. It definitely didn’t require a Barista AND a cashier anymore. Dean was pretty certain the owner was just keeping him employed part-time at the till out of a misguided sense of pity. Pity wasn’t something Dean liked or appreciated… but his rent needed to be paid so he didn’t have the luxury of protesting.

Charlie giggled and looked at Ash triumphantly, “Told you he’d recognise me immediately. Can’t say the same of him,” she added pointedly, looking to where Dean was sitting and giving him a swift once over.

Dean flushed hotly. “Yeah, well, fuck you too,” he snarled. “At least I’m not a fuckin’ Dev.”

Charlie clasped her hands to her mouth, her eyes widening and filling with tears. On anyone else the exaggerated gestures would have looked fake. Somehow, in her case, her horror seemed genuine. “I…I… just meant… meant… you’re a goblin in the game, Dean… Your avatar is butt ugly… but, damn, I’m gay not blind. You’re seriously hot.”

Dean sneered at her. Somehow, his expression didn’t make him any less attractive but clearly expressed his disgust at the idea a pretty face made him ‘hot’. Except for Lisa, no one had ever bothered trying to deal with the rest of his baggage and even she had finally decided he wasn’t worth it.

“I don’t mean to be indelicate,” Charlie said cautiously, “but under the circumstances I would have expected you to have chosen a … um… more… imposing physical avatar for the game.”

Dean raised an eyebrow challengingly, “You mean I should have spent the points on a bigger dick?”

“One as big as you’re being now?” Ash interrupted. “Give her a break, Dean. It’s an honest question.” He turned to Charlie and decided to answer the question himself. “Dean can’t play a taller character without suffering vertigo. He’s only got a third-hand gen one RVR face-hood. Plays hell with spatial awareness. Besides, it’s easier to grind the levels up starting from a basic goblin account if you’re not a pay-to-player.”

“Or a dev,” Dean added bitterly. “Must be nice having access to infinite resources as well as a bespoke avatar.” Then he frowned suspiciously. “Hang on, how the hell do you know my game identity anyway?”

Charlie flushed a little but offered him a genuine smile. “I asked Ash to introduce us when I realised you were RL friends as well as Guildmates. I thought it would be better than just turning up on your doorstep as an anonymous Game Rep. I thought the company offer would sound more genuine if you received it from someone Ash already knows because, trust me, it sounds too good to be true.”

“What offer?” Dean asked suspiciously.

Charlie bounced with palpable excitement. “It’s seriously great, Dean. Roman Enterprises are launching a Beta Test for a new phase of Moondoor and your account has been picked by C.H.U.C.K. to take part in the testing. If you agree to take part, RRE will pay you a small salary, supply you with the very latest VR rig, a bespoke avatar and a sizeable RSS credit account and, best of all, the rig will be yours to keep at the end of the Beta. It’s win, win.”

Ash whistled loudly. “Are you talking one of those new Gen Nine full sensory immersion tanks?”

“Oh, yeah,” Charlie agreed. “Even I only have a Gen Seven and I’m one of RRE’s top devs. The kind of rig they are offering will retail at over 80k after the Beta.”

Dean frowned suspiciously. “You’re right,” he announced gruffly, “It does sound too good to be true. I ain’t buying it.” He raised a finger to shush her when she opened her mouth to interrupt. “Why the hell would Roman Enterprises pick me for this? I’ve invested a grand total of $49 in Moondoor since my account opened. There are guys in my guild who regularly spend four or five hundred dollars a week.”

“And yet you still are placed within the top 100 players in the realm. That’s not shoddy playing for a practically free account. You managed to grind your way into the top rankings with nothing but persistence and skill and some luck.”

“A lot of luck,” Dean corrected honestly. Moondoor had a lot of easter-eggs hidden inside its framework and Dean had stumbled over far more than his fair share of them. It made him immensely unpopular with some of the highest spending players because he consistently seemed to win items that they themselves had spent real money on.

Charlie shrugged. “What can I say? C.H.U.C.K. seems to like you.” She shrugged disarmingly. “Seriously, though, the required parameters for the Beta were fed into the system and it churned you out as one of its ten picks. There are nine other players in the Beta, and you all are getting the same offer. But you’ll have to sign a NDA for the actual details of the test.” She turned to Ash and grinned widely. “I brought an NDA for you to sign too, Ash, so we can all talk about it together. It is going to be soooo cool.”

“Gimme,” Ash said, reaching to snatch the paper out of her hand and signing it with a flourish.

“You didn’t even read it,” Dean pointed out.

“It’s a non-disclosure agreement, not a crossroads deal,” Ash scoffed.

Since Ash was usually paranoid enough for the both of them, Dean shrugged and signed his own copy when Charlie passed it over.

“Right, Bitches, this is the good stuff,” Charlie grinned. “Moondoor is getting a system-wide upgrade. All the realms are going to be invaded by a Dark Queen who will imprison my character and then launch ‘The Darkness’ and, effectively, everyone’s player account will be reset to zero because none of the weapons or skill points from the current game will be relevant in Dark Moondoor. Sure, we’ll lose some top level players because they’ll get pissed at being zeroed but the game is addictive enough that most players will get over the initial shock, then spend even more money to get back to the top in the Darkworld. The best bit, the part where you come in, Dean, is that the Darkness is going to introduce the idea of Boss Players. As you know, at the moment Bosses are all NPC’s, computer generated V.I.’s and players attack Bosses for points and prizes but defeating a Boss doesn’t give you the ability to become one.

“In Dark Moondoor, a player will be able to become a Boss. In fact, the top ten player levels will be reserved for Boss ranked players only. To make that possible, C.H.U.C.K. will create ten Dark Bosses, known as the Knights Of Hell. The Knights will all bear a sigil called the ‘Mark of Cain’ but otherwise will be visually indistinguishable from any other player so they will be able to move within Moondoor incognito. Unlike NPC Bosses, Player Bosses won’t register on player interfaces as Bosses. Players will all fight to become Knights of Hell themselves, but there can only be a maximum of ten so the only way to become one is to identify a character as a Knight, then defeat them and steal the Knight sigil for themselves.”

“What happens to a defeated Knight?” Dean asked.

“After the Beta, a defeated Knight character will be permanently deleted from the game. No do-overs. No spare lives. No resurrections. A Knight Boss is not only going to be the most powerful in the game but also the most vulnerable. A player killed as a Knight will have to create a new character and start right from level one all over again. During the Beta stage, the initially seeded Dark Knights will get ten lives so they need to be defeated ten times before the first ‘real’ player becomes a Boss.”

Ash whistled. “That’s seriously weird. I see why the Devs are doing it. Only a really high spending player is ever likely to become a Knight, and that kind of person is likely to spend the same amount again to get back to Boss level if they are kicked out of the game. But only if being a Boss is worth the spending in the first place. What game play does a Knight actually get, other than being consistently attacked by lower level players?”

Charlie shrugged. “That’s still in development, to be honest. Bosses can usually only advance levels by defeating other bosses and the Knights will be able to fight NPC Bosses to level their characters but I heard a rumour that the Knights will be given Quests to destroy each other until eventually only one Level 10 Knight remains, which suggests that they advance a Boss level only by killing another Knight.”

“So what’s the endgame?” Dean asked.

“A level ten Knight will be strong enough to fight the Queen of the Darkness. Defeating her will restore Moondoor to its current state and I will become Queen of Moondoor once more. I don’t think the company believe it’s possible though, because I’ve already been asked to leave the Moondoor team and move over to the Oz development team as soon as The Darkness launches so I think my current game character is effectively dead. I don’t mind though, because this is cool for Moondoor and the Oz game looks like it will be fun anyway.”

“You’re right, Charlie. This is mega cool. Epic,” Ash gushed.

Dean huffed rudely. “It’s bullshit,” he scoffed. “If all the other players are going to be effectively zeroed at the start of the ‘Darkness’, what’s going to stop the ten Knights simply destroying the lot of them immediately? Best way to prevent anyone ever defeating them is to work together to stop anyone ever getting big enough to be a challenge.”

“See,” Charlie grinned. “You ARE smarter than you look,” she said, with a friendly wink. “There’s a couple of ways the Devs will prevent that scenario. Firstly, the Beta testers, like you, have been chosen specifically to ensure their personalities clash big time. Trust me, some of the guys C.H.U.C.K. has chosen don’t even know what co-operation means. One of them has reached the top ten simply by inviting people into his guild, waiting until they trust him, then killing them for their inventories.”

“Crowley,” Dean said, knowingly, and Ash nodded his agreement. Both had watched in growing disbelief as that particular player had repeated the same treachery over and over. Their surprise hadn’t been that he kept repeating the game play but that other players were stupid enough to keep falling for Crowley’s tricks. Suckers.

“His RL name is Fergus McCloud,” Charlie laughed, “but his Avatar name is definitely more fitting. He’s a real back-stabbing devil, for sure. Another ‘collector’ character is Magnus, you’ve probably seen him in the game? His game play is similar. Instead of fighting battles, he sets snares, traps players, kills them and steals their RSS and Gear for himself. I won’t bore you with a list, but basically all the Knights, other than you, are known for their complete lack of empathy for other players. It’s the only reason your presence in the Beta Test was questioned, to be honest. No one could work out why C.H.U.C.K. chose nine complete assholes to be bosses, but then picked a player like you to be the tenth. Your playing record is completely different, Dean. You help your guildmates, are generous with your resources and often help the newbies to learn the ropes. You’ve never turned on anyone in the game and, unlike a lot of players, you never start fights. In your entire playing history, the only players you have zeroed are ones who have attacked you or your guildmates first. In the end, my team decided that C.H.U.C.K. just wanted some balance by adding a Righteous Boss into the mix.”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed by the praise, “You said a couple of ways,” he reminded her, to change the subject from himself.

“With the release of the Darkness, C.H.U.C.K has released new races of NPC’s into the game. Angels and Demons. They aren’t Bosses, but they have varied Boss-level powers. Normal, lower-level players can ‘pray’ for Angelic assistance and these new NPC’s will fly to their aid in a battle scenario. Of course, they can only ‘pray’ if they have built up sufficient Faith Points, and there will be a lot of events and quests for players to do to build up FP. Or players can do crossroads deals with Demons for demonic assistance, but they will have to sacrifice Soul Points for their help. Players will start with a base of SP but further SP will have to be won or earned. Soul Points are going to be a pretty dangerous currency though, as they will be tied into HP. If a player loses all their HP while they have zero SP, their characters will get trapped in ‘Hell’ and then have to win a long sub-game to escape. If they can’t escape, they’ll have to respawn as lev one characters again to get back to Moondoor.”

“Why would anyone do a demon-deal instead of sticking with the Angels?” Ash asked, shrugging in bemusement.

“Because the Angels are going to be mega-dicks,” Charlie laughed. “Forget fluffy cherubs. These are going to be C.H.U.C.K.’s warriors and are going to have the same dispassionate attitude towards players as ‘He’ does. They will be intelligent V.I’s, of course, programmed to have little or no ‘free-will’ but they will still have personalities and not necessarily pleasant ones. They will interact with players but be capricious in their help to prevent any players gaining an unfair advantage. So, for instance, if a player is about to be zeroed, summons an Angel and that Angel needs 100 FP to stop the attacker but the player only has 99 FP to offer, the Angel will either give 99 FP’s worth of help, leaving the player to deal with the balance themselves OR the Angel might stick to the letter of the law, say ‘you don’t have 100 FP so I’m going to just stand here, refuse to help at all and just watch you die’. Like I said, Dicks.”

“So can Knights do demon-deals or summon Angels?” Dean asked.

Charlie blinked at him slowly. “Well, the Demons and Angels have been created to aid players against the Knights… but, now you mention it, there’s nothing in C.H.U.C.K.’s rules that says a Knight can’t use them to their advantage too. The way the game has been written, Demons and Angels are available to all players and Knights ARE players. Interesting idea, though. Not sure how it would work in a game scenario.”

“Maybe a Knight could summon an Angel or Demon to help them take out another Knight?” Ash suggested.

“Yeah, but I can’t think of how a Knight would build the necessary FP or SP to use them,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “I definitely know the team haven’t written any quests or events for the Knights that would provide them as rewards. Still, Moondoor is a complex game. C.H.U.C.K. is such an advanced AI that it sometimes feels like ‘He’ is writing the game ‘himself’. There definitely seem to be a lot of parameters within Moondoor that the Devs haven’t physically coded in so the AI must be creating them. So it’s possible there are any number of scenarios which would enable SP or FP collection, I just can’t think of any specifically.”

“You said there would be a small salary,” Dean interrupted. “How small?”

“A thousand a week,” Charlie replied.

“That’s small?” Dean gasped and, whatever anyone said, that wasn’t a squeak in his voice.

Charlie shrugged, “It’s less than a Dev’s salary,” she clarified, “but it’s meant to represent an average US salary, in the hope that Betas such as yourself can dedicate most or all their normal working hours to the game.” She kindly didn’t point out the obvious, that Dean clearly was lucky to earn even half that amount currently.

“And how long is the Beta test?” Ash demanded.

“Dependent on how other players react to Dark Moondoor, the Beta is expected to run at least one year,” Charlie replied. “Simulations have indicated the possibility that a really determined player, investing sufficient cash into the game, MIGHT gain the ability to defeat a Knight in as little as three months but that is highly unlikely and the Beta Knights can respawn nine times, so realistically I imagine most of the Beta Knights are committing to two or three years of gameplay. Roman Enterprises is guaranteeing a minimum salary though, so even if you were unlucky enough to be taken out early you can bank on one year’s full pay.

“All RRE is asking for is a minimum commitment of 8 hours game play, five days a week and 3 hours a day at the weekends. The company will also ‘freeze’ your account for a maximum of two weekly periods over the year so that you can take a holiday without your character being at risk.”

Ash frowned at her. “You know players like Dean, freed of the need to earn a living, will probably voluntarily spend almost every waking hour in the game. Particularly playing characters as high as these Knights. What’s the long-term health issues with using the full immersion tanks to that extent?”

“None,” Charlie replied automatically, then her smile slipped a bit. “Actually, no-one actually knows for sure. Theoretically none, but that’s what I was TOLD to say, ‘they are 100% safe’. Gotta be honest, though; I often spend ten or twelve hours a day in my Gen 7 tank, and after a while I definitely get a bit of muscle wastage and end up having to hit the gym for a week to compensate.” She looked at Dean with concern, “It might be more of a problem for you, Dean. I don’t think anyone has tested the tanks long-term with your particular… issues. This is supposed to be a great opportunity for you, not a risk to your health. Maybe you should get some medical advice before deciding.”

Dean frowned at her, torn between being pissed off or touched by her seemingly genuine concern. Pissed won the day. As always, the suggestion he couldn’t do something made him even more determined to actually do it. Until that moment, he had still been undecided whether to accept the offer. The high (in his experience) salary and the free rig still felt too good to be true and his gut was twisting with a niggling doubt but the suggestion the only reason he would turn the deal down was his disability removed his ability to say no. Pride no longer allowed refusal.

“You said the offer included a bespoke avatar,” he said, instead.

“Yes,” Charlie agreed. “You can choose any humanoid race, sex or appearance. Or you can have one that looks exactly like yourself, like my avatar.”

“You’ve definitely got bigger tits in Moondoor,” he pointed out bluntly.

Charlie shrugged, unoffended. “Okay, exactly like yourself but better,” she agreed. “The game chicks dig my tits.”

“So my avatar will be able to walk?”

“Of course,” she said, her voice softer. “And the immersion tank will fully compensate for that. You will be able to experience walking, and everything else, perfectly.”

“Then let’s do this,” Dean said, his voice determined. “I accept the offer.”

It was Ash who looked uncomfortable then, his face twisting with uncertainty. “Are you sure, man?” he asked cautiously. “It might really screw with your head, being ‘you’ in the game then returning back to RL and, well…” he gestured awkwardly at Dean’s chair.

For just a second, Dean hesitated. A tendril of fear shot through him, winding with the still nagging ache of his twisting guts, like a premonition of disaster. This gift horse had some potentially sharp teeth. Yet he chose, in that moment, to take the opportunity offered and worry about the consequences later.

A deal with the devil, indeed.

He wondered whether he had just surrendered a whole pile of SP.

But he still reached for the contract that Charlie offered him.

Art by Aidokime


	2. Drinking the potion

“You do know what I do for a living?” Sam demanded, rolling his eyes in exasperation.

Dean sighed heavily. “Yes, Sammy. I am well aware, which is why I called you.”

“After you already signed the contract,” his brother pointed out. “Which is a bit damned pointless, don’t you think?”

“I don’t need your permission,” Dean grumbled. “I wasn’t asking for your legal advice. I’ve signed and I’m doing it. I just thought… well, that you ought to know what I’m doing. Quite apart from anything else, I won’t be available during deep immersion so I thought you should know I’ll be uncontactable for at least eight hours a day. Not that you ever do, contact me, I mean, so I dunno why I bothered telling you really…” his voice petered out and he sank into a sulky silence. He didn’t know why Sam always made him feel like HE was the younger brother.

Sam looked momentarily uncomfortable, looking away from the screen to compose himself before continuing the Skype call.

“Look, Dean, I know you’ve been worried about your job security lately but I’ve told you before you can always ask me for help if you have financial problems. I understand it’s difficult for you to find employment where you’re living which is why I keep suggesting you move to California. People here are a lot more open minded. In fact, I’m pretty certain I could find a position for you in my firm. My employers are big on diversification. Besides, I’d feel better knowing you weren’t a plane ride away if there is any sort of emergency situation.”

“Whilst I appreciate your offer of some menial desk job to allow your employers to tick some equal-opportunity box in their HR department, I actually have found myself a job, like a real boy, and it pays more than $50k a year so thanks, but no thanks,” Dean replied dryly.

“Did you even read this damned thing?” Sam demanded. “The waiver clause? The one that means Roman Enterprises have no liability for any ‘bodily injury or death caused directly or indirectly by participation in the test process’?”

Dean flushed hotly. “It’s a video game. How the hell could I get bodily injured or killed playing a video game? It’s obviously just a standard legal contract clause. You get the same kind of crap written on the back of parking permits.”

Sam shrugged, accepting the point reluctantly. “I still don’t like it,” he muttered. “How do you know this VR equipment they are supplying is safe? I read an article about a guy who got killed in-game using one of those full sensory immersion tanks and he had a heart attack and died for real.”

“Firstly, that was an older generation model. The tanks now automatically wake you before the point of game-death AND they are on autodial to the nearest ER in case of emergencies. If my heart rate reaches a critical point, an emergency responder will be with me before the tank even opens,” Dean replied. The installers had been thorough in their explanation of how the tanks worked. “Besides, I’m twenty-eight, not fifty-eight. I think my heart can handle a bit of excitement.”

“I just think it’s weird they picked you,” Sam muttered. “Moondoor has over two million regular players. The odds of them offering you this position are…well… it’s just weird…”

Dean agreed, but wasn’t going to give his brother the satisfaction of saying so.

“Look, I just called to let you know I was doing this. I’m going to take a test run in this thing. If anything feels hinky, I’ll quit, okay?”

With a little more grumbling and muttering about doom, Sam ended the call and Dean was left to contemplate the VR rig that had been installed that morning.

Too big to fit in the bedroom of his tiny apartment, the rig now dominated his living room like a hulking, metal coffin. His sofa had been jammed against the far wall, with the TV and coffee table piled on top of it to free enough room for the rig and the hoist mechanism that would allow him to easily climb in and out of the device from the left hand side. On the right of the VR rig, thick cables snaked to the wall socket where a new power supply had been fitted. The meterbox proudly displayed the RRE logo. Apparently, his power and broadband would be supplied off-grid, directly from Roman Enterprises. He was glad he wasn’t going to be paying the power bill, though he felt vaguely unsettled that he was going to be completely physically dependent on his new employers whenever he was in-game.

Also on the right side of the rig there was a large cabinet-type box, again connected by fat wiring. This, he’d been told, held fluids such as saline, so that the rig could automatically rehydrate him whilst playing. The lower part of the cabinet was for ‘eliminations’. Apparently he didn’t even need to leave the rig to take a piss. Contractors would keep the cabinet serviced on a regular basis, just letting themselves in whenever a remote signal alerted them. When he’d offered a spare key for that purpose, the rig installer had just smirked and said it ‘wasn’t necessary’.

Another reason he was feeling unsettled.

And yet the rig was calling to him, a siren song he was finding increasingly harder to resist.

Charlie had skyped him the previous evening, finalising the details of the Beta Test. He would enter the game in a realm called Purgatory, the waiting room where dead NPC characters were stored whilst they waited to respawn into the game. According to Charlie, those characters were primarily monsters of one variety or other and tended, as a consequence, to spend most of their time in Purgatory killing each other in various ways to pass the time.

“It’s a really good trial arena for the new bosses,” Charlie had explained. “The program dynamics are such that even as a Boss you will start the game with a level one character score. The fastest way to level up your character will be through combat. You’ll need to get to at least level 15 before you have enough XP to function as a Lev One Boss, otherwise you’ll get killed off pretty fast in Moondoor. Besides, the game will demand you reach character level 30 as a minimum condition of achieving Boss Level 2. So even if by some miracle you find another Knight straight away and kill them ten times, you still won’t advance Boss levels without your character reaching lev 30.

“The good news is that deaths in Purgatory don’t count. Ever. So you could just keep getting killed in there, over and over, until your XP from battle experience levels you to the necessary 15 to enter the main game. I wouldn’t suggest it though. The thing about the immersion rigs is, getting killed HURTS. It doesn’t do you any true physical damage, obviously, but when you are in-game, trust me, that pain and blood is going to feel really REAL.

“If your HP ever drops enough that the next injury will zero you, the rig will automatically pull you out of the game before the killing blow strikes. Your character will still die, but you won’t feel the blow that does it. That’s a huge bonus. I once got zeroed in one-strike by a lev 3 boss and it hurt like a mother, and when I woke in RL I was absolutely convinced I was dying for a couple of minutes until I finally caught my breath. So, needless to say, avoid that if possible.

“And, final advice for now… ignore system messages in-game as much as possible. I always do my inventory checking, points allocations and strategy planning outside of the rig. I like my in-game experience to feel as realistic as possible, so rarely ever run my system interface while playing. The system will interrupt you with verbal warnings if there is something you really need to know in a situation. Other than that, running the interface just reminds you you’re in a game and that really defeats the object of having a rig at all.”

Looking at the rig now, recalling Charlie’s advice, Dean could see the sense in her suggestion. The whole idea of having a total immersion rig was so you could see, touch, taste and feel as realistically as though you were really living inside the game. Having an interface screen running would totally negate that realism.

So he logged into the game terminal outside of the rig to do his character check BEFORE entering Purgatory.

Player Name: Dean The Righteous

Dean rolled his eyes… clearly Charlie had thought that was funny. He couldn’t see an ability to change player name in the interface, though, so he shrugged and moved on to finding out what mega powers a Boss possessed.

It turned out, not very much:

Character Level: One

Race: Undetermined

Class: Boss

Rank: One

Lives: 10

XP: 100

Mana: 0

HP: 200

SP: 0

FP: 0

Gear: Crude Bone Dagger

Spells: Mark of Cain Sigil

Mounts: 0

Followers: 0

He blinked. Shouldn’t a Boss have a hell of a lot more HP at the very least? From the looks of things, he had a big fat zero of just about anything. Even a basic goblin started the game with 100 XP and 100 HP. He’d expected to have some kind of epic weapon but ‘Crude Bone Dagger’ didn’t sound very epic.

He swallowed heavily, ignoring the wave of crushing disappointment that threatened to overwhelm him. Obviously, that was why he needed to level up to 15 before entering Moondoor. He searched the interface for more details, such as how many XP he need to gain per level and the rewards that would be offered.

Nothing.

No details whatsoever.

All the system was telling him was the crappy current condition of his character and absolutely nothing else.

No quests.

No events.

Nothing.

Nada.

“This is bullshit,” he snarled. “What the fuck kind of crappy programming is this anyway? How the hell am I supposed to know what to do next?”

Almost as though the system had heard him, a cursor suddenly blinked on the screen…......

…… QUEST ……

Your character is trapped in purgatory, a realm of roaming murderous monsters. You must find your way out of Purgatory and enter the kingdom of Moondoor and defeat the Queen of the Darkness.

…… ESCAPE FROM PURGATORY AND TAKE YOUR RIGHTFUL PLACE IN MOONDOOR ……

…… REQUIREMENTS TO COMPLETE QUEST: 

……. Character Level 15

……. XP 1500

……. HP 2000

……. Mana 500

……. REWARD: Entry into Moondoor

……. ACCEPT QUEST? Y/N

Well, Dean shrugged. That was more like it. Time to go kick some monster-butt.

Using the hoist he manoeuvred into the VR rig, pulled up the internal console, pressed ACCEPT QUEST: Y and waited for the rig to close and transport him into the game.


	3. Purgatory

There was no sensation of sleeping yet the rig closed over him, like a coffin lid sliding shut, and a mere moment later he definitely felt as though he was waking up from a deep sleep.

Before he even opened his eyes, he was aware of a myriad of sensations. The sound of light wind and birdsong, a distant burbling of what he assumed was a stream, the light gossamer fingers of a cool wind on his skin, an almost painful stab of gravel and grass into his kneecaps…

With that his eyes shot open.

He hadn’t felt any sensations below his waist since the accident.

He was kneeling in a small clearing, naked as the day he was born, his arms prickling with gooseflesh from the chilly breeze, his knees protesting their irritation at the uneven ground.

Yet he ignored his legs completely. What he was more unashamedly interested in was the soft, flaccid cock lying against his thighs.

He blinked in astonishment. It had never even occurred to him that a ‘lifelike’ bespoke avatar would include fully detailed genitals. Whoever had designed his avatar hadn’t stinted, either. If anything his virtual cock was longer and fatter than his own real life one and…. more to the point….

He reached out and touched it, watched it twitch in response to his hesitant stroke, and his eyes filled with tears. He swallowed heavily, choked with more emotion than he was sure he could handle.

Dean the Righteous had a dick. A working dick. One that actually was responding to his fingers and shooting sensations into his brain that absolutely, without question, felt absolutely authentic.

Why had no one ever told him about this?

Why had not one of the apologetic doctors in all the years since his accident ever suggested that a virtual avatar would be able to give him back that part of his life that he’d lost?

He would have robbed a damn bank for the cash if he’d known he could BUY some semblance of the life stolen from him by a drunken father and a ton of crumpled metal.

“I can’t lose this,” he sobbed to himself, clutching his groin and delighting in the pain shooting through his nerves as his fingers squeezed painfully at the fake and yet oh-so-very-real flesh that pulsed in his hands. “I have to beat this game, have to keep this job, this rig, can’t ever go back to not having this…”

And it was at that moment, totally distracted, that he first died in Purgatory as a monster crept up and cut his head off.

####

Dean jolted awake as the rig opened, taking a gasp of choked breath. What the fuck had happened? Why had he fallen out of the game?

He checked the system interface and groaned.

…. MONSTER AXE HIT YOU FOR 240 HP ….

…. YOU HAVE DIED …

…. RESPAWN Y/N ….

Dean hadn’t felt a thing, despite Charlie saying it would hurt. Then he thought about it some more and realised the system would have realised the axe blow would kill him before it even hit, so had pulled him out of the game before contact had been made.

He flushed slightly with embarrassment that he had been killed whilst fondling his game dick, then ignored his death as a trivial inconvenience that was completely irrelevant compared to the idea he actually HAD a game dick. A working game dick. Not that he intended to, well, use it in game with another player character because #Creepy or an NPC because #SadBastard but a little bit of self-abuse sounded completely a-okay with him.

Who would have ever thought that Moondoor would work as an interactive porn interface? Suddenly Charlie’s comment about game chicks digging her tits took on a new and all more interesting connotation.

Still, to stay in the game and keep the good times rolling he really needed to see what impact the death had caused to his character.

He pulled up his character scorecard.

Player Name: Dean The Righteous

Character Level: One

Race: Undetermined

Class: Boss

Rank: One

Lives: 10

XP: 125

Mana: 0

HP: 200

SP: 0

FP: 0

Gear: Crude Bone Dagger

Spells: Mark of Cain Sigil

Mounts: 0

Followers: 0

So getting killed had increased his XP by just 25. At least his number of lives hadn’t gone down so Charlie was right that Purgatory deaths didn’t count.

Which reminded him he had a question for Charlie.

He used the system interface to send her a quick in-game PM. 

… So what’s with the naked idea?????

It took a moment for her to reply.

… it’s a ‘Naked and Afraid’ kind of thing. First unwritten mini quest is to kill someone and steal yourself a loin cloth. Until then, you’re swinging in the wind. Hope you like your Avatar btw. I called in a couple of favours to make sure you got some good ‘equipment’….

….So that’s not a standard ‘package’????

…. LOL…. You want to see Crowley’s package…. but you might need binoculars…. EVIL WINK

Dean grinned. He was beginning to really enjoy Charlie. Even if she worked for RRE, and was just doing her job, he believed they were genuinely becoming friends.

Okay, so time to get back into the game but this time, instead of just kneeling there jerking off he needed to get moving right away and find a defensible position while he scouted the lay of the land. Obviously he wouldn’t stand a chance against the monster that had just killed him, but there had to be smaller, weaker NPC monsters to fight.

Ones that hopefully had clothes to steal.

He looked at the interface screen and the blinking words:

…. RESPAWN Y/N ….

“Hell, YES,” he exclaimed, and hit the control to re-enter the game.


	4. L.O.K.I.

“Son of a bitch!” Dean gasped, as the rig slid open and thrust him back to RL awareness.

In the last half hour he had re-entered the game three times and immediately died three times. He hadn’t even gotten past opening his eyes, let alone getting to his feet to escape or attempt to defend himself. As far as he could tell, the damned monster was just standing there in the clearing waiting for him to respawn so it could behead him again.

He checked the system interface and saw, for the fourth time:

…. MONSTER AXE HIT YOU FOR 240 HP ….

…. YOU HAVE DIED …

…. RESPAWN Y/N ….

“This is fucking pointless,” he grumbled.

Then the system cursor flashed again.

…. LEVEL UP ….

He checked his scorecard. His XP had risen to 200, which had obviously trigged his character level to change to 2. For a moment he felt a little satisfaction, then groaned as he realised the level up had given him 50 HP. He now had 250 HP, ten more than the monster was hitting him with. Which meant that if he returned to the game, the monster would hit him for 96% damage and he would not only feel the pain of the blow this time (and he was sure Charlie was right about it hurting like a mother) but would continue to feel the pain for the few seconds it took for the remaining HP to drain from his decapitated corpse.

“There has to be a way to enter purgatory at a different point,” he muttered. “I need a damned realm map.”

A realm map icon popped up on his interface.

Dean took a deep breath and counted to three. Then, in a deliberately calm voice, he said:

“I would also like to see my inventory.”

Two more icons popped up. A Gear Symbol and a Spell Symbol. He clicked on the Gear Symbol and saw ‘Crude Bone Dagger – Equip Y/N’.

“You FUCKER. Why the hell didn’t you show those before?” he snarled at the screen.

… YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR THEM … DUH ...

Dean’s mouth dropped open in astonishment.

“Charlie? Is that you?” he demanded furiously, sure this had to be a Dev fucking with him.

… I’M L.O.K.I. YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SYSTEM INTERFACE. I’M NOT HERE AT THE MOMENT, BUT LEAVE A MESSAGE AND I’LL GET BACK TO YOU… MAYBE…

Dean blinked in shock. This was a V.I.? A snarky, very fucking unhelpful VI? Who the hell had programmed this thing?

He clicked on the Spell Symbol. It said ‘Mark of Cain’ but the ‘Equip Y/N’ was greyed out. Next to it was a drop-down menu. 

Spell Level

| 

Mana  
  
---|---  
  
1

| 

50  
  
2

| 

150  
  
3

| 

250  
  
4

| 

500  
  
5

| 

1000  
  
6

| 

1500  
  
7

| 

3000  
  
So he needed Mana to activate the spell (whatever it actually did) but he had no mana. How did he get mana? When he was playing as a goblin, he’d been awarded skill points for each level up and he’d been able to allocate them to various skills to his profile. Surely, the Boss character had to have a similar game dynamic.

“Show me available skill points,” he demanded.

…. YOU HAVE THREE AVAILABLE SKILL POINTS … 

“And how do I use them?” Dean demanded.

The screen remained dark and unresponsive.

“Oookay,” Dean said, through gritted teeth. “You’re obviously going to make me do this the hard way. Show me my skills inventory.”

A Skills Symbol appeared in the bottom right corner of the interface.

Dean clicked on it and just three sub-menus appeared. Magic, Combat and Knowledge.

He thought carefully. Knowledge presumably would include learning the ability to check an enemy’s Stats but knowing just how powerful a monster was would be pretty pointless until he had the ability to actually fight it. Combat was the obvious choice at this level but, still, three combat skill points were going to be a mere drop in the ocean if all he had to work with was a single ‘crude bone dagger’. So the question really was whether the ‘Mark of Cain’ spell could offer him any significant advantage. Since he didn’t know what the spell actually did, it would be risky to throw all his points into Magic, especially as the screen was only offering him 50 mana per point allocated.

“Go big or go home,” Dean decided. “Apply three skill points to Magic.”

… ARE YOU SURE?...

Dean rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

… YOUR FUNERAL, DEANO …

Dean just sneered at the screen. He was pretty sure the VI was just messing with him (and, wow, that was some seriously cool programming even if it was annoying as fuck to deal with) but it was too late now anyway, because skill points couldn’t be reallocated if he’d made a mistake.

He returned to the gear screen and equipped the dagger, then he clicked on the Spell icon. It was no longer greyed out and now read: “Mark of Cain Lev 2 – EQUIP Y/N”

That was interesting. The system had automatically applied the mana to the sigil so it had already levelled up.

“Yes,” he said, pressing the screen. The Magic Symbol on the main interface flared red to indicate the spell was live, though he still had no idea what it did. As he watched, he saw his mana bar starting to slowly refill even as another bar indicated his Spell would only remain active for another twenty minutes.

“What does the Mark of Cain do?” he asked the VI

It didn’t answer.

Figured.

Well, he had only got twenty minutes and counting to find out for himself so it was time to get back into the game.

He pulled up the map, chose a grid location in purgatory at random and re-entered Purgatory.

……

He arrived in a swamp, kneeling waist-deep in stinking, murky water. He was still naked (and scrambled quickly to his feet because who knew what kind of carnivorous shit was swimming through the water around his junk) but this time he was holding a strange white dagger. It was the absolute definition of ‘crude’ and ‘bone’, seeming to be little more than a carved jawbone of some prehistoric animal.

The other difference that was immediately apparent was he now had a strange tattoo on his right forearm. A tattoo that glowed a malevolent red.

“Oh, that’s useful,” he groaned. “Let’s apply a spell that makes my arm light up like a beacon just in case any monsters haven’t already noticed me arrive.”

He had barely finished grumbling before something wrapped around his left ankle and jerked him off his feet. He landed face-first in the water, already frantically slashing his knife towards whatever had caught hold of him. Even blind in the darkness of the water, he managed to strike whatever was holding him and he felt it release and retreat.

… YOU HIT SWAMP SNAKE FOR 40 HP ….

… YOU GAIN 10 XP …

Coughing and spluttering, he quickly rose to his feet again. The fact the snake had retreated so quickly suggested it was only looking for easy prey and so might not even be much of a challenge but without the ability to check (damn, maybe he should have put a point in Knowledge after all) Dean was going to take no chances. He hurried through the swamp looking for firmer ground.

His thighs burned with the effort of wading through the ankle deep water but he welcomed the throbbing pain. He was NEVER going to complain that walking hurt because it was a miracle worth suffering for.

He worked his way towards a bank covered in small trees and bushes, then climbed onto it cautiously. He wouldn’t be surprised if those bushes concealed an attacker or two but he needed to get out of the water since he already knew the water definitely concealed predators.

Sure enough, the moment he was on dry land something burst out of the trees to his right and barrelled towards him with a high pitched howl of fury.

It was humanoid, at least, and pretty small. A hobgoblin, rather than a goblin, so taller than the character Dean had previously played in the game but still under five foot and since it was only wearing a skimpy leather loincloth it was easy to see the creature was so near starvation that its bones were far more prominent than its muscles.

Dean wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating it though. Hunger and desperation were good motivators and, besides, despite the crudity of its weapon, which was more of a big log than an actual club, the hobgoblin looked like it meant business.

The other problem with the log was that it had considerably longer reach than Dean’s dagger, so despite him brandishing the blade threateningly towards the creature it didn’t prevent the hobgoblin’s forward momentum smashing the end of the log against Dean’s left shoulder.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean yelped. That hurt. That REALLY fucking hurt. 

… HOBGOBLIN CLUB STRIKES YOU FOR 25 HP …

Okay, it might not have done THAT much damage to his Avatar but Dean felt almost sick from the throbbing ache down his shoulder and his entire left arm felt numb.

Sure, when he had played before, with his VR Hood, he had felt a physical pain when his avatar had been injured but it had been little more than a tiny electric shock. Just a simulacrum of pain, just enough to let him maintain the fantasy that he was really fighting.

This was completely different.

Completely REAL.

He could feel the blood pooling under the injury, feel the sensations of a bruise forming under his skin, could feel the debilitating shock of the blow reverberating through his whole body.

Totally real.

TOO real.

For a moment he was tempted to log out of the program completely.

Who hell thought it was FUN to feel actual, physical, sickening pain just to play a goddamned game? No salary was worth this kind of shit.

His distraction gave the Hobgoblin the chance to strike again and this time its club landed a heavy strike against his hip.

… HOBGOBLIN CLUB STRIKES YOU FOR 30 HP …

“FUCK,” Dean roared, as a wave of agony passed through his lower body.

But that was the Hobgoblin’s mistake.

Had it hit him again on the upper body, Dean might well have followed through on his decision to quit the game. But the pain below his waist, pain where no feeling had existed for over ten years, THAT pain abruptly reminded him that this was more than just a ‘game’, more than just ‘fun’, more, even, than just a ‘job’.

This virtual world was the first real ‘living’ Dean had experienced in over ten years.

“Fuck YOU,” he told the Hobgoblin, as it came in for strike three.

He still had nearly 200 HP so he completely disregarded the incoming blow, letting it strike him, ignoring the sickening pain of its impact, moving in towards his attacker, rather than flinching away, stabbing his dagger forwards into the creature’s exposed chest, burying it into the Hobgoblin’s heart.

… HOBGOBLIN CLUB STRIKES YOU FOR 30 HP …

… YOU STAB HOBGOBLIN FOR 120 HP (60 CRUDE BONE DAGGER X 2 MofC SIGIL)…

Dean twisted the knife, burying it deeper as the creature clawed at him in desperation.

… HOBGOLIN SCRATCHES YOU FOR 5 HP …

… HOBGOLIN SCRATCHES YOU FOR 5 HP …

… YOU STAB HOBGOBLIN FOR 50 HP (25 CRUDE BONE DAGGER X 2 MofC SIGIL)…

The light dimmed in the creature’s eyes and it slumped to the ground, the knife ripping out of its chest.

… HOBGOBLIN KILLED …

… 100 XP GAINED …

… LEVEL UP…

… YOU HAVE REACHED CHARACTER LEVEL 3 …

The corpse of the goblin began to glow, a low red light infusing its body as it began to dissolve back into the game prior to respawning. Dean waited for it to disappear, as usual, but instead the red light seemed to shrink, smaller and smaller, forming into an egg-sized pulsing ball of energy. Before his mystified eyes, the egg continued to shrink, getting smaller and harder and more solid until, finally, nothing remained on the ground except a discarded loincloth and a small ruby gemstone.

Dean reached forwards and picked the items up. He stuffed the loincloth into his gear inventory, hoping it would be a ‘new’ loincloth when he extracted it again, then stared in confusion at the gem.

… SOULSTONE 

… GEM PRODUCED WHEN THE MARK OF CAIN EXTRACTS A SOUL …

… HOBGOBLIN SOUL – 25 SP …

… ADD SP TO INVENTORY? Y/N

“Whoah,” Dean breathed. Not only did the Mark of Cain increase the attack of the bone dagger by multiples of its own level but it also extracted Soul Points from a kill. The soul points Charlie had been sure a Knight would be unable to acquire.

And that meant a Knight who killed enough other characters would end up with an infinite number of Soul Points and be thus able, presumably, to access a vast amount of demonic assistance. A really ruthless Knight of Hell would probably end up being the KING of Hell.

Which seemed completely contrary to the game plan Charlie had described for both the Knights AND the Demons.

Was this an example of C.H.U.C.K. doing its own programming again?

He needed to talk to Charlie and, besides, his Spell Sigil timer only had two minutes remaining and he didn’t want to meet another monster without it. Damn his shoulder hurt like a mother.

Dean decided to log out and give his health and mana bars time to regenerate. Plus he had levelled up. He probably had skill points to allocate.

Time to go ‘home’ and check his scorecard.


	5. The price of a soul

Levelling up had again given Dean three skill points. He added two to magic, adding 100 mp so that he reached spell level 3. After a little deliberation, he put the remaining point against Knowledge, hoping that would give him at least a basic analysis ability. He decided to apply points to Combat next time, because he’d need a whole five skill points to level Magic up any further and at this stage of the game he needed to grow his character as quickly as he could.

He looked at his scorecard.

His profile was still piss-poor but had grown substantially in less than a couple of hours of play:

Player Name: Dean The Righteous

Character Level: Three

Race: Undetermined

Class: Boss

Rank: One

Lives: 10

XP: 310

Mana: 250

HP: 300

SP: 25

FP: 0

Gear: Crude Bone Dagger. Basic Loincloth.

Spells: Mark of Cain Sigil 3

Mounts: 0

Followers: 0

Satisfied he’d done as much as he could until his health and mana fully regenerated, which would take another 23 minutes (the downside of not having died this time was that he lost the automatic reset provided when respawning), Dean sent a PM to Charlie.

… Am I supposed to win soul points if I kill a monster whilst the Mark of Cain sigil is active???

After a few minutes delay, she replied.

*** WHAT? No. Hang on. Let me check something…

He waited, tapping his fingers impatiently. It was a good ten minutes before Charlie messaged again.

*** I just checked the coding. It’s definitely not something my team wrote into the program BUT I also checked your account history so I can see the game awarded you SP points for that kill. Dunno how that happened. Must have been C.H.U.C.K. but makes no sense to me why ‘he’d’ do that. Players like Fergus and Nick are going to decimate Moondoor at this rate to try to win control of the Demons.

… I know Fergus is ‘Crowley’. Who is Nick?

*** Calls himself Lucifer in-game. Guildmaster of the Cage Guild. You must have noticed his play-style.

… Shit, you told me the other knights were assholes but I never imagined HE would have been chosen. That guy is seriously insane. He doesn’t kill other players; he captures them and tortures their avatars until the players give up, quit the game completely and self-delete their characters. Hell, I hope he never caught one with a bespoke avatar. That doesn’t even bear thinking about.

*** Between you and me, he HAS on more than one occasion. RRE has received several legal claims for mental distress caused to players with immersion rigs but the company line has always been that they should just have given up and logged out sooner. As far as I know, no one has ever warned Lucifer over the complaints or told him to change his play-style.

… Still, maybe if he enjoys torturing too much to actually kill characters, he’ll never realise the SP points are available.

*** In normal game circumstances you’d be right, but he’s going to have to work his way through Purgatory just like you so I think it’s inevitable that he kills something there and figures out the way to gain SP.

… Dammit. Okay, change of subject. Who the hell programmed my System Interface because, I’m telling you, that L.O.K.I. is one seriously messed up V.I.

….

….

….

….

…. Charlie? You still there??

….

….

…. Charlie?

*** Sorry, I was just checking something. I …. Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Dean…. Thing is, the System Interfaces aren’t usually seeded with V.I.’s. The meta data behind Interfaces is pretty rigid so the game provides basic straightforward non-interactive menus that don’t require Virtual Intelligences to operate.

…. Trust me, my Interface is anything but straightforward and it DEFINITELY interacts with me. L.O.K.I. is not only a V.I. but a damned annoying, snarky one.

*** I’m not doubting you, Dean. But all I can say is it SHOULDN’T be a V.I. and your system report doesn’t show any anomaly. From our side, you just have a basic non-interactive screen menu. It HAS to be something C.H.U.C.K. has done for some reason and because I can't see the coding change in your game, I can't tell you whether the other Knights also have had their interfaces altered. Do you want me to see if we can overwrite your profile with a standard interface?

Dean thought about it, then shook his head.

… Leave it for now. If it’s something all the Knights have, changing it might cause me a disadvantage.

*** Okay, let me know if you change your mind. Don’t take too long deciding though, because I’m transferring to the OZ game at the end of the week.

… Damn, I forgot about that.

*** I’ll send you my private email addie before I log out of this system. I won’t be able to PM you in-game like this but I promise I’ll still assist you as much as I can.

… Okay. Thanks. I guess I’d better get back into Purgatory and grind some levels. I need to log another six hours of play or they might dock my pay on my very first day LOL

*** Oh. I should clarify that you only need to be logged in, not actively in-game. You get paid even if you’re outside of the rig adjusting your profile, regenerating HP or messaging other players. The System is currently showing you as having been active for 3 hours 13mins already today.

Dean grinned with relief. That would make his life easier, at least during the Purgatory stage, because he wasn’t sure a full eight hours of full on combat was possible to achieve. Still, his HP and Mana were at full again and he was ready to re-enter the game, so he signed off with Charlie and reactivated his VR rig, equipped his dagger and loincloth, activated his Sigil (it now said it would be active for 45 minutes, so he was pleased he had levelled it up) and chose yet another random port to enter the game at a new location.

####

Well, that was a nice surprise.

This time he had materialised in an open meadow, kneeling in lush grass, with no monsters whatsoever in sight.

He opened the interface to bookmark the location, then closed it again. If this place remained a safe entry port he’d be able to arrive in Purgatory before activating the Sigil which would give him a longer gameplay. To use the Sigil for maximum effect, he would be best only activating it when combat was inevitable but his first four entries into Purgatory had taught him to be wary of being attacked as soon as he arrived.

To the south, the horizon hinted at distant mountains and, in lieu of any better ideas, he decided to head towards them. He strolled almost casually, enjoying the sensation of simply taking a walk through pleasant fields on a sunny day. He was glad of the loincloth. Although it was tiny, little more than a leather pouch, he still felt less vulnerable and the game day was warm enough that he felt so discomfort from having no other clothing. Still, he was going to need decent gear soon enough. Armour preferably, though he wasn’t sure he was exactly looking forward to having to fight someone to gain it. Now that he knew fighting other characters caused real pain, he felt a lot less gung-ho about initiating combat with the NPC’s.

When playing his previous character, he had avoided combat with _players_ if possible primarily because he was always conscious they were real people who had spent RL money and time to earn their character levels. He had never understood the players who seemed to take satisfaction in destroying other players just for ‘fun’. NPC’s though, computer generated non-player characters, were fair game and Dean had delighted in battling them. Killing an NPC was a thrill and the best way to advance in the game and, because they were just computer coding, he never felt a moment’s doubt or hesitation about treating them like canon-fodder.

Now that NPC’s could actually _hurt_ him, they felt less like easy targets and more something to avoid fighting with whenever possible.

Well, unless they had something he really wanted of course….

… LIKE SOUL POINTS?....

Dean stopped walking and frowned.

“I turned you off,” he pointed out.

….WELL, YOU DEFINITELY DIDN’T TURN ME ON….HA…HA…

Dean shook his head in irritation at the snarky V.I.

“You aren’t supposed to interact with me,” he advised it, “And, anyway, how the hell do you know what I am _thinking?_”

… TYPICAL MEAT SUIT. YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW THIS WORLD WORKS, DO YOU?

“I’ve been playing Moondoor for six years,” Dean retorted. “I reached Rank 93 as just a goblin avatar, so I think I have a pretty good idea of how the game is played.”

…IT’S NOT A GAME…

“Sorry, Bud, it definitely IS a game,” Dean chuckled. “And you’re just a fat windbag of computer code, so your opinion doesn’t really count.”

…THAT’S RACIST…

“And calling me a meat suit isn’t?” Dean countered.

…POINT…

“Thank you.”

…SO…SOUL POINTS…

“Not interested,” Dean replied dismissively. “I might not have a fancy degree or anything, but even I am smart enough to know that doing deals with Demons ain’t never going to end well for anyone. I dunno what the game is playing at but until I have a better handle on what is needed to reach EndGame, I have no intention of using any of that shit.”

…YOU ARE USING A DEMONIC SIGIL… 

“Well, DUH,” Dean replied, pleased to take his turn in snarking the VI. “It’s not like I have anything else in my inventory, is it? But I’m using it for its combat multiplication, NOT because of the SP it generates. That’s just a side-effect, not my game-plan.”

… DEMONIC ITEMS CORRUPT USERS …

That made Dean stop in his tracks again.

“Come again?”

…USE OF A DEMONIC ITEM WILL INCREMENTALLY INCREASE CORRUPTION IN THE USER…

“Show me,” Dean demanded. He hadn’t seen anything on the interface to indicate L.O.K.I. was correct.

…DATA NOT AVAILBLE DURING PURGATORY TRIAL PERIOD…

Dean thought about that, then whistled under his breath. “So, what you’re saying is that using the Sigil in Purgatory is going to have some long-term ‘corruption’ effect on my player character but that I won’t know what it’s actually done to me until I enter Moondoor?”

…CORRECT…

“Okay… so, what effect does ‘corruption’ have on a player?”

…DATA NOT AVAILBLE DURING PURGATORY TRIAL PERIOD…

“You can’t tell me or you don’t know?” Dean demanded.

…DATA NOT AVAILBLE DURING PURGATORY TRIAL PERIOD…

Dean coughed a laugh. “So, basically, you have no idea. You butt in, give me some dire-warning of impending doom…maybe… or maybe the whole point of being a Knight of Hell is that I am _supposed _to achieve maximum corruption or some such crap.”

…WELL, SINCE I AM JUST A ‘FAT WINDBAG OF COMPUTER CODE’, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT???

Dean was still formulating an answer to the VI’s comment when a roar and thundering of hooves distracted him back to his immediate surroundings.

“Jesus H Christ,” he swore.

Charging across the field, directly towards him, was a huge black animal that resembled a cross between a horse, a rampant stag and an armadillo. The beast had a definite horse-like head and neck, with a lustrous mane, yet it had huge antlers that protruded from the top of its skull, and its body was thick-set like a rhino and plated with thick armour.

Dean looked around himself frantically. There was no cover within reach, no-where to run or hide. Absolutely no way whatsoever to avoid the charge of the creature. He might as well stand his ground and assume the VR rig would wink him out of the game before he was actually pulverised. Though, hang-on, what if its critical hit was less than 300 HP?

“ANALYSE,” he yelled.

Proving that one skill point in knowledge was greatly insufficient, all L.O.K.I. provided in response was;

…GREMLIN LEVEL 10…

“Gremlin?” Dean scoffed. “That’s not a fucking gremlin.”

But, suddenly, he realised that maybe one point was going to be enough knowledge after all.

“Hot damn… That isn’t a monster… it’s a MOUNT. Analyse mount.”

…ANAKORN LEVEL 5…

A level 5 mount was a significantly fast and powerful one, but it was still just a mount. The actual threat was the rider and despite the size of the Mount, which was a good six foot at its shoulder, its rider was miniscule in comparison and only a level 10. A level ten player would be a challenge to him at his current level, a level 10 _Gremlin_? Not so much…

A gremlin? A goddamned gremlin? Seriously? He was about to be taken out by an NPC no bigger than his forearm?

Fuck that…

The Mount would be offering its rider a shit-load of XP but that wouldn’t work if the rider was dismounted. In his goblin avatar, what Dean did next wouldn’t have worked but he was in a bespoke Avatar now, one that reflected his real-life size and height (well, if in RL he could stand up), and so instead of running away from the charging Anakorn he ran _towards_ it.

He ran right at its face, staying in a straight line of collision until he could actually feel its breath on his face and smell the pungent wet-dog scent of its wild, whipping mane, and then, at the last second, he swerved right, missing the Mount’s snapping teeth, grabbing a handful of black mane with his left hand and using that and his forward momentum to leap up onto the Anakorn’s back like a Native American in a Western Movie.

He landed directly behind the Gremlin, his bone dagger clutched in his right hand, and before the NPC had time to do more than scream in fury, he ripped the jagged teeth of the knife across the Gremlin’s neck and decapitated it.

Two things happened immediately.

His face was drenched by a thick, gush of arterial blood and the Anakorn came to such an abrupt stop that he was thrown forward, head-first, and hit the ground in a painful crash.

… FALL OFF ANAKORN. MINUS 15 HP. MINUS 100 CP…

… YOU HIT GREMLIN FOR 75 HP (25 x 3)

… GREMLIN KILLED.

… YOU HAVE GAINED 75 XP

… ITEMS DROPPED: SOULSTONE 15 SP. MOUNT ANAKORN

… ADD TO INVENTORY Y/N?

“What the fuck are CP’s?” Dean demanded.

… COOL POINTS …

“There’s no such thing as ‘cool points’.”

… JUST AS WELL, DEANO

Dean disregarded the VI as he suddenly realised the MOST important part of the system information he’d just received. He’d won the mount. He now owned a goddamned MOUNT.

What were the odds of a level 3 character winning a mount in battle?

Well, about as low as the odds of him finding one being ridden by a mere Gremlin.

“I dunno what’s going on here, but somebody must like me,” he muttered.

…NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE…

“No, seriously Loki, this ‘luck’ I keep having doesn’t stack up.”

And although Dean didn’t notice he had unconsciously treated the VI like an actual ‘person’ for a change, rather than simply a computer program, there was a definite change to the VI’s ‘tone’ when it finally responded.

…PERHAPS C.H.U.C.K. APPROVES OF YOUR ATTITUDE REGARDING SOUL POINTS…


	6. First Blade

So, it turned out that inner thigh friction burn was a ‘thing’.

Dean had a new understanding of why movie cowboys wore chaps.

He reluctantly patted his Anakorn on the neck and then dismissed it back into his inventory. Until he managed to win himself some pants, the mount wasn’t going to be much use to him. Still, on the bright side, it _had_ carried him from the meadow to the foot of the mountain range and had done so without incident so, although it might simply be that there were no monsters in this region, Dean was pretty sure his safe progress across the vast grassland had been primarily because no one had been willing to approach him whilst he was mounted.

That was both good news and bad news.

Good because, well, no pain (obviously) but bad because without fighting he wasn’t going to get out of Purgatory at all. The slaying of the Gremlin hadn’t even moved him to the next character level and he was determined to level up at least once more before quitting for the day.

He was hungry, maybe because he hadn’t stopped to eat lunch in RL or maybe because his character required food in-game regardless of whether he ate or not outside of play. He wasn’t sure. He remembered Charlie telling him his character would be provided with a substantial pile of RSS and assumed food would be one of those items. He wasn’t sure how it worked with a bespoke avatar though. As a goblin, he’d always simply allocated Food Points to his character when the game had demanded them. He suspected that his current character needed to actually _eat_ food, given that he had an aching pain in his guts rather than a system bar blinking a warning in his inventory.

“Hey, Loki,” he said, keeping his voice low since he was now approaching stacks of fallen boulders at the base of the first mountain and they would provide good cover for any monster lurking within them. “What do I have available to eat?”

… YOU HAVE 2000 PORTIONS OF BASIC NUTRITIONALLY BALANCED TRAVEL RATIONS…

“Wow”, Dean replied, impressed with his apparent wealth

… THEY TASTE LIKE CRAPPOLA…

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Loki but, “Issue one portion”.

A lump of a hard, brown substance plopped into his right hand. It looked horribly like a big, hard dog turd. Dean squared his shoulders and took a bite. Fortunately, it tasted better than it looked. But not much. Still, nutritionally balanced meant the food would be adequate to keep his character HP level steady so he manfully continued to chew until the portion was ingested. There was no point worrying about getting better food yet.

He could try to catch a rabbit or something, because he knew from experience he could claim ‘raw meat’ from a game animal kill but without a fire or any herbs or seasonings, he didn’t think meat would be any taste improvement on the rations. So he put the problem to the back of his mind. He’d survive on the crappy rations until he got to Moondoor where he’d have access to Inns and Food Vendors and such. 

His musing was interrupted by a deep, ground-shaking growl as a huge pile of rocks to his left began to _stand up._

“Oh shit, ANALYSE.”

… ROCK OGRE… LEVEL 15 … XP 582 … HP 1900 …. UH OH … YOUR ASS IS GRASS, DEANO …

As the monstrous beast started to lumber towards him, a huge club in its hand that was literally bigger than Dean’s whole body, Dean decided the V.I. wasn’t wrong.

But, he decided, as he avoided the first blow by throwing his body into a forward roll and scrabbling behind a boulder for cover, he wasn’t going to just accept defeat and log out prematurely.

If he simply got killed, he would gain a minimum of 25 XP and that, added to his current XP total, should give him a level-up.

But if he managed to get a little bit of damage in before he got smashed into jelly, he should be able to substantially increase his game experience. Fighting something so much stronger than him could give him enough XP to level up a couple of times at least. IF he could stay alive long enough.

What did he need? What had he got?

Well, clearly, he needed a goddamned cannon. What he actually _had_ though was just a single bone dagger. He could throw the dagger and that would probably take the Ogre down 300 hp, with the Sigil’s 3x multiplier, but he’d be unable to retrieve it. He wasn’t worried he’d lose it. It would just return to his inventory after the battle, but the important point was that he wouldn’t be able to throw it twice.

Oh well.

He threw the dagger. It flew through the air true and struck the Ogre in the top of its left thigh.

… YOU STRIKE OGRE FOR 450 HP … ((100 x 50 Stealth Bonus) x 3)

So that was a result. He got an unexpected bonus for striking the Ogre with a surprise attack. Even so, the Ogre not only had 1450 HP remaining but now looked decidedly pissed off.

With a roar of pure fury it marched towards him, each step causing the ground to shake and the small rocks around Dean’s feet to rattle and roll about.

That gave him an idea. He reached down, grabbed one of the larger rocks and lobbed it towards the Ogre.

It hit the creature and bounced off seemingly without any result but then LOKI said:

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 10 HP…

“YES!!!” Dean exclaimed triumphantly, grabbing more rocks and hurling them one after another at the OGRE even as he continued to scramble backwards out of its path.

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 10 HP…

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 5 HP…

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 10 HP…

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 5 HP…

… YOU HIT OGRE FOR 5 HP…

And then Dean’s back hit a wall of rock as he ran out of room to retreat.

“Oh shit,” he said, as the club descended towards him and…

The rig slid open and he sat up with a gasp.

… YOU HAVE DIED …

…. OGRE HIT YOU FOR 600 HP ….

…. XP GAINED 140

…. LEVEL UP

…. LEVEL UP

Two level ups.

Result!

“Show scorecard,” he demanded.

_Player Name: Dean The Righteous _

_Character Level: Five_

_Race: Undetermined_

_Class: Boss_

_Rank: One_

_Lives: 10_

_XP: 525_

_Mana: 250_

_HP: 500_

_SP: 40_

_FP: 0_

_Gear: Crude Bone Dagger. Basic Loincloth._

_Spells: Mark of Cain Sigil 3_

_Mounts: 1: Anakorn Lev 5_

_Followers: 0_

_Skill Points To Allocate: 6_

Dean punched the air in triumph. “Allocate 5 to magic and 1 to combat,” he said, since he had enough to get the Sigil to level 4.

“Oh,” he said, in surprise, as he rechecked his inventory. Instead of the combat skill showing as a separate item, the Bone Dagger had risen to Level 2. That made sense though, he decided. Increasing the base power of the Dagger would increase his strike ability. Even so, it made him wonder what would happen if he acquired a new, better weapon. Would the skill point transfer to whichever weapon he wielded?

“Loki, show me the weapons options for my character.”

… CRUDE BONE DAGGER …

“Not what I currently have,” Dean said, with an irritated sigh. “I need to see the options that will be available when I level up more. Show me all weapons that this character can utilise if I obtain them.”

… CRUDE BONE DAGGER ….

“Seriously?”

… X MY HEART AND HOPE TO… OH WAIT….

“Okay. If I accept that, let’s try asking this a different way. What is the maximum skill level available for the Crude Bone Dagger?”

… FIRST BLADE …

Dean blinked in confusion. “Define ‘First Blade’.”

… ONLY KNOWN WEAPON THAT CAN KILL A HIGH LEVEL KNIGHT OF HELL …

“Define a ‘High Level Knight of Hell’.”

… BOSS LEVEL FIVE AND ABOVE…

Dean considered that one carefully. That meant he would need to kill four other Knights to be considered a ‘High Level’ Boss and then as a Level Five Boss he could only be killed by someone wielding a ‘First Blade’. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Requirements to raise ‘Crude Bone Dagger’ to’ First Blade’.”

…REQUIRES CRUDE BONE DAGGER LEVEL 14 AND BOSS LEVEL FIVE…

“And let me guess, ‘Crude Bone Dagger 14, requires Boss Level Four.”

…BINGO…

“So there can only ever be a maximum of two level five Knights of Hell. If one knight manages to reach level six, its game over anyway for the other Knights. They won’t stand a chance against the Knight with the First Blade. But, hang on, does that mean a level five will automatically become a level 10 by killing the other level 5? It must do, or it won’t work because there are only 10 Knights in total. More to the point though, this means I have no choice about whether or not to hunt down the other Knights. If I don’t and one of them reaches Boss Level Six, they will be undefeatable.”

… AVAILABLE DATA SUGGESTS YOUR ANALYSIS IS CORRECT…

“So, I assume I can raise the Dagger to level 10 simply by allocating skill points but from then on I am stuck unless I kill another Knight.”

… CORRECT …

“But to kill another Knight I’m going to need to use my Sigil to empower the knife and doing so will ‘corrupt’ my character.”

…CORRECT …

“But we don’t yet know what ‘corruption’ does to a character.”

… ALSO CORRECT …

“Great.”

… ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?...

“This game sucks. YOU suck. And that’s it folks, I’ve done more than enough and am logging out for the day.”

Dean could have sworn he heard the V.I. laugh as he shut the program down.


	7. Reality bites.

Deciding to avoid the mountains, and further Rock Ogres, until he was considerably stronger (unless he needed a quick emergency XP boost and was feeling particularly sadomasochistic) Dean rode South the next morning at a leisurely pace, conscious of the need to reduce the amount of friction on his seat to maximise the amount of time he could ride the Anakorn.

He was feeling optimistic. In just one day of gameplay he had reached level 5, and only needed another 10 levels to enter Moondoor. Realistically, he expected the levelling up to become more difficult from this point. He couldn’t recall exactly how the game mechanics worked at such a low level since it was years since his goblin character had taken the same progression journey, but he was pretty sure the first 5 levels had been relatively easy to ensure Newbies didn’t just give up before the game addicted them. From level 5 upwards, the XP needed to achieve a level up increased exponentially.

And, thinking about game points and levels, it was about time he had a ‘conversation’ with Loki. He had woken up that morning clear-headed after the best night of sleep he’d had in years. Despite his game-time being mental, rather than physical, somehow he had felt actually physically exhausted after his time in Purgatory and that had translated into the kind of heavy sleep he normally couldn’t achieve. So feeling well-rested and positive, he had spent most of his time eating breakfast in deep consideration of the best way to move forward in the game.

He needed to take Charlie’s advice completely and switch off the game interface. He needed to immerse himself completely in ‘living’ the moment, rather than just playing a game.

… YOU WANT TO TURN ME OFF COMPLETELY?... I’M HURT, DEANO… YOU HAVE CUT ME TO THE QUICK…

Dean blinked as the words popped up, near translucent over his vision.

“No, but this is part of what I’m talking about. How the hell is this supposed to feel ‘real’ to me if I keep seeing your comments scrolling in front of my eyes? You can apparently read my goddamned mind, so can’t you just…I dunno… _talk_ to me or something?”

“Of course I can,” a bright, cheerful voice boomed inside his head. “You just had to ask. Mind you, don’t know how listening to voices in your head is an improvement. Going to feel a bit schizophrenic if you ask me.”

Dean shrugged. “I know having a voice in my head is still weird but it’s at least feasibly something that I can convince myself is ‘real’. I can adjust to the idea easily enough. I’ll never learn to disregard actual game mechanics scrolling in front of my vision.”

“Fine by me. All that typing is a balls ache anyway,” Loki said breezily.

“And, on the same note, I want you to stop giving me in-game score-results unless I specifically ask for them. Thinking about it, it makes no real difference whether or not I know the specific HP drain of each hit. At least not in Purgatory. I’ll either win or lose, and I might as well wait until afterwards to read the system messages that tell me why. On the whole it’s a pretty straightforward process anyway. The monsters are either smaller than me or bigger and that’s what determines the outcome.”

“Not necessarily,” Loki said. “Size isn’t always everything, Deano.”

“Well, not always,” Dean agreed, “But I said ‘on the whole’. I know there are going to be exceptions, characters that look physically small but have mega power levels, but realistically they will cream my ass whether I know they are powerhouses or not. So let’s try to make this whole thing _feel_ a lot more realistic. I still don’t have a clear idea of how this Knights of Hell crap is going to work itself out but I definitely think it’s going to be a lot more complicated to reach EndGame than simply participating in a series of basic Boss fights. So I think I need to get into the right headspace and actually try to believe this world is real whilst I am inside it, rather than just a game.”

“It isn’t a ‘game’,” Loki insisted snottily.

Dean chuckled. “Well, obviously it isn’t one to YOU.” He shrugged easily. “From now on, I’ll do my best to act like you’re right.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” Loki muttered snippily.

Damn, Dean was in awe of whoever had programmed the V.I. Not only did it seem to interact seamlessly with him in-game, it actually managed to add tone and inflection into its ‘voice’ to portray emotions… and sarcasm. A _lot_ of sarcasm.

His attention was suddenly pulled back to his immediate surroundings. In the distance he could hear a noise that sounded like a high-pitched scream of fear.

Human or humanoid, he decided, and almost definitely female.

He urged his Anakorn to hurry, patting it absently on the side of its huge neck as it responded to his mental command with a surge of speed.

Loki had obviously already switched off the entire visuals of the interface because Dean no longer had sight of the Mount’s XP and HP bars. It felt momentarily like he’d just given himself a huge debuff by removing that information, but then he reasoned that if the mount started running out of energy it would start slowing down, just like a real animal, so all he needed to do really was treat it like it was a live animal and look after it accordingly.

“You need a name,” he told the Anakorn fondly, but put that thought on the backburner as the rising volume of the screaming warned him they were getting closer to wherever the action was taking place. He was approaching the edge of the grasslands, where the meadow broke into copses of trees and bushes, a landscape very similar to the one he had seen when he first entered the game. For all he knew, it was exactly the same place. The one where the axe-wielding monster lurked.

This close, he could tell for certain that the voice _was_ female. Not only that, it sounded _young_.

He galloped past the first copse of trees, past the second and then burst into a clearing where a battle was taking place.

No, not a battle.

A slaughter.

Three large humanoid males, wielding short swords were surrounding a tall human female wearing little more than a leather bikini and a copious amount of blood. She also was holding a short sword and it was clear she had used it to effect as her three attackers bore visible injuries too.

It wasn’t the woman screaming.

Her face, flushed with exertion, was fixed in a mask of murderous rage as she attempted to keep the three males at bay despite what looked like a critical wound pouring blood and HP from a deep slash across her gut area.

The screaming was coming from the tiny girl child hiding behind the woman.

The little girl looked no more than five or six years old, though she clutched a tiny blooded knife in her hands and attempted, now and then, to strike a blow from behind the woman towards the legs of the attackers.

Without even stopping to consider his actions, Dean aimed the charging Anakorn directly at the closest of the three males.

The impact knocked the male off his feet so violently that he flew through the air and collided with one of his colleagues and they both landed in a tangled heap of limbs. The second one stirred groggily but immediately began to climb to his feet, stunned rather than injured. The first remained crumpled on the floor, clearly out cold.

The third male turned with a roar and charged towards Dean who had been unseated by the impact and was now sitting, also stunned, on the ground.

But the moment the male turned towards Dean, the gravely injured woman took advantage of his exposed back and launched her sword like a spear, impaling him from behind. He took a couple more steps, his eyes wide in astonishment, then slumped to the ground and winked out of existence.

By that time, the second male had reached Dean, swinging his short sword in a wide, vicious arc towards Dean’s neck.

Dean ducked and rolled, activating his sigil and dagger, scrambling to his feet so quickly that the blade caught him only glancingly on his left shoulder. It still cut through his flesh and he yelped with pain as a large gash opened wide enough to expose bone.

“Son of a bitch,” he gasped. That damned well HURT.

But his right arm, the one holding the dagger, was uninjured and he moved in towards his attacker, pushing close into him to avoid the sword, managing to stab the monster deeply in the sternum and then twisting the weapon and sawing with it to open the wound wider.

“Ow, ow, OW,” he yelped, as his foe gave up trying to cut him with the sword and instead used its pommel as a club and started smashing down on the back of Dean’s head. The blows were painful but Dean could tell they weren’t life-threatening because there was no significant drop in his own energy levels. Besides, they were rapidly decreasing in power as he continued burrowing into his attacker’s guts until the NPC’s eyes dimmed completely.

Satisfied it was dead, he dropped it to the ground and turned to where the third attacker lay unconscious.

It was gone.

So was the woman.

But standing where the third male had been lying was the tiny child, knife in hand.

She had, at least, stopped screaming.

“What the fuck?” he asked Loki.

“Looks like everyone died except you and short-stack there,” Loki replied airily.

“Damn,” Dean cursed. “What am I supposed to do now? I can’t just leave a kid here on her own.”

Even as he said it, he knew it made no sense. This was Purgatory. The only characters here, other than Knights like himself, were NPC’s. What looked to him like a little girl was only a line of computer code waiting to be respawned into Moondoor.

A line of computer code that probably looked like a real tasty little candy snack to all the monsters in Purgatory.

He wondered how many times the little ‘girl’ had already died in this place whilst waiting to be reborn into the main game and he felt sick.

Which was kind of insane.

“LOG OUT”, he demanded gruffly. “NOW, damnit.”

He woke in the RL with a gasp of breath that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

“So much for realism,” he told himself bitterly.

That had been far TOO real.

He had raced into that fight without even considering the fact that in reality he had just been fighting against a bit of computer code in defence of _another_ bit of computer code. He had actually completely forgotten it was just a completely fake scenario and that the woman and child didn’t really exist.

For the moments of that battle he had truly been trying to save a _real_ woman and child.

Having a bespoke avatar was really screwing with his head.

But…

But…

Hadn’t that been what he had wanted?

…BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, DEANO…

Outside of the game, Loki had returned back to a mere typing cursor on his screen.

He was still a snarky, sarcastic little shit though.

Even if he was no more ‘real’ than the little girl.

…YEAH, YEAH, KEEP TELLING YOURSELF THAT…

“Fuck this,” Dean snarled, activating the hoist to pull himself out of the rig. He needed some real life interaction with someone. He needed some external perspective on what he was doing in this game and what the long-term psychological implications might be of fully immersing himself in a virtual world.

Time to go to ‘Lil Beanz and talk to Ash.


	8. Kobayashi Maru

“Well, in moments like this it’s always best to ask yourself, ‘What would the great Jim Kirk do?’” Ash said, straight-faced.

They were sitting in ‘Lil Beanz, sharing coffee and apple pie. Except for a couple of pensioners nursing a pot of tea near the window, the coffee house was deserted as usual.

Dean barked a cough of laughter. “You want me to Kobayashi Maru the fuck out of this situation?”

“Absofuckinglutely, my friend.”

“How?”

“Being in Purgatory is a zero-sum game. The longer you stay there levelling up, the more harm the sigil does to your character. So your answer is to get the heck out of there early,” Ash replied, with a careless shrug.

“How the hell do I do that? Come to think of it, _why_ the hell would I do that?”

“The _why_ is pretty darned self-evident,” Ash said. “This Loki guy says you’re going to get ‘corrupted’ every time you use the demonic sigil but you need to level up your character and the only opportunities to level up your XP in Purgatory are through killing monsters and that means you have to use the sigil. It’s a catch 22. But in Moondoor there are a ton of ways to increase your XP that don’t involve combat. Guild Quests, for instance. Sure, you’re going to be more vulnerable if you go to Moondoor before you’re stronger and you lose the Purgatory advantage of infinite lives but if you’re smart about how you play and keep your head down so no-one realises you’re a Knight, you should be fine. The only downside of it is that you might not progress levels as quickly as the other Knights but, on the other hand, you don’t get riddled with corruption.”

“Not that we have any idea what getting ‘corrupted’ even means,” Dean pointed out.

Ash shrugged. “Hey man, just the word alone is pretty indicative that it’s a ‘bad thing’,” he said, and Dean could actually hear the parenthesis in his voice.

“Actually, I’m seriously beginning to wonder whether it is also going to represent some kind of RL _soul_ corruption,” Dean admitted carefully. “Because, I can’t stop thinking about that little kid in Purgatory. The thing is, I _know_ that kid is a NPC monster because she’s in Purgatory so…duh… but there’s also the fact that third guy was out cold last time I saw him and then, suddenly, he’s dead and the kid is standing there with a knife so, well, kind of obvious who ganked him. But, still, little kid, you know? 

“And sure, in Moondoor, you come across monsters that wear little kids and women and all that crap but you can walk away if, well, if it feels wrong to engage them. But in Purgatory it’s all a kill or be killed situation. And I never was the kind of player who could just say ‘fuck it’ and fight indiscriminately anyway but now I have this new avatar it all feels so damned _real_, you know? Like what I do in the game could actually leave a stain on my RL soul. Crazy, huh?”

“Dunno, Man,” Ash replied thoughtfully. “It’s a chicken and egg thing, maybe. I mean we all come across real assholes in the game and just assume they are dicks in Moondoor because they are dicks in RL. Maybe, well, maybe it works both ways. Maybe being a dick in Moondoor makes you more dickish in RL? I mean, unless you’re Bi-polar, there has to be bleed over in both directions. Dunno. Either way, it makes it all the more important that you get your ass out of there ASAP.

“As for the _How_, it’s almost a certainty that there will be a back-door or two written into the Purgatory sub-routines. The programmers would have considered the unlikely possibility of a Player accidentally dropping into Purgatory and would have written some way for them to escape. It wouldn’t have mattered that the scenario was highly improbable. It would have been too potentially problematic to ignore completely.”

Dean thought about it. It made sense. Although the odds of it happening were infinitesimally small, it was at least a _possibility_ that a dead Player character could actually find themselves dumped into the Purgatory waiting-room rather than automatically respawning in Moondoor. Trying to extract that Player character out of the trillions of lines of code that formed Purgatory would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack for the Devs. It would either take more man-hours than RRE would want to spend or the Player would be forced to abandon their character and restart the game from lev one. Considering the vast amount of time and money Players invested in their characters, a mistake like that was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

“Besides, if you get into Moondoor, I’d be able to help you in-game,” Ash continued. “As long as we’re in the same Guild, I’d be able to gift you a shit-ton of crap from my inventory. Knight or not, you’re a Player character, so the same in-game rules must apply. I have a load of spare clothes, armour and weapons.”

“I can’t utilise any weapons except the dagger,” Dean reminded him.

“You can’t _utilise_ them, but you can _use _them. The fact you can’t imbue a basic sword with your Knight mojo crap is a disadvantage, sure, but a sword is still a sword, a gun is still a gun and dead is _always _dead.”

“Holy shit, you’re right,” Dean exclaimed. “If I’m not bothered about trying to win SP, using a different weapon will be fine. It will still win me XP and keep me alive. I won’t be able to use any combat skill points to advance the weapon, since those are tied to my dagger, but as long as I am a high enough character level and my weapon is advanced enough, it won’t be a huge disadvantage. Well, not against other normal Player characters, anyway.”

“So we get you through one of the back-doors into Moondoor, we hook up, and then you keep yourself incognito, playing as a basic low-level newbie until you can build yourself up and I’ll look after you as much as I can. How many other level 5’s have a lev 81 Magician buddy to watch their back?”

“None because, smartass, none of the decent guilds are open to players as small as I am now. Our guild won’t even accept applications until a player reaches level 30.”

“Our ex-guild,” Ash replied, with an embarrassed shrug.

“Huh?”

“I got booted. When this Darkness thing happened yesterday and Queen Charlie got captured, the whole Guild was gung-ho for a suicidal rescue mission. Obviously, I had the inside knowledge that anything we did was going to be pointless so I didn’t want to burn through all my RSS and gold getting my ass kicked for nothing. Because of the NDA, I couldn’t tell anyone _why_ I didn’t want to fight. So they all decided I was a coward and kicked my ass out of the guild. I am now officially a ‘traitor’. They awarded me a permanent badge and everything. 5% magic debuff. Ouch.”

“So you’ve lost all your Guild bonuses too,” Dean said. Although it was possible to play Moondoor without joining a Guild, there were large aspects of the game that were inaccessible to solitary Players. Like Guild Quests.

“Nah, I joined the ‘Hunter’ Guild. They’ll take anyone, it seems. Even ‘The Traitor Of Moondoor’.”

“Taking ‘anyone’ isn’t much of a recommendation for a Guild,” Dean pointed out wryly.

“Seriously, they wanted me for my mad Skills level and so decided to accept it when I said my title had been given to me out of spite. 95% of me is still a shit-ton better than 100% of anyone else. Most of the Hunters hate the Top Guilds anyway, so it wasn’t hard to convince them I just got on the wrong side of some asshole. More to the point, the Hunters don’t have a low-level cap on new players. They’ll let anyone in as long as a current Guild member vouches for them so I’ll just say you’re okay and you’ll be golden.”

“Who vouched for you?”

“The Guildmaster of the Hunters, Bobby Singer. He’s a grouchy old coot but I’ve known him in-game for years. We aren’t exactly friends but we’ve had some coinciding mutual interests in the past. He’s surprisingly cool when he’s not being a grumpy bastard. Pretty sure he’s a bespoke avatar, but I could be wrong,” Ash shrugged.

“So our game plan is for me to get out of Purgatory, meet up with you, join this Hunter Guild and then, what, hide in plain sight as a ‘Hunter’?” Dean asked.

“Sounds good to me, since no-one except the other Knights even know you exist yet and _they_ are going to be stuck in Purgatory levelling up for a while. I’ve got a couple of dozen Realm Ports in my inventory, so as soon as we know where you arrive, I’ll be able to port to you and then we can move somewhere to regroup and devise a plan. Find some quests and shit for you to do to get your XP built up without using your demonic sigil.”

Dean took another mouthful of pie and chewed thoughtfully. Everything, he firmly believed, was improved by pie. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, taking a swig of coffee, swallowing the last of his pie and then staring a little sadly at his empty plate. “Since there’s a way to get SP, there must be a way for me to get Faith Points too.”

“From what Charlie said, the Angels are going to be as dickish as the Demons. Why would you even want to bother?” Ash asked.

“I’m not necessarily talking about summoning any of the Angels,” Dean clarified. “I’m just thinking, well, I dunno, but maybe if getting SP points ‘corrupts’ me, then I can somehow counteract that corruption with FP. I’m probably over-thinking it but my gut kind of is telling me it’s an answer.”

Ash whistled under his breath, unconsciously responding to Dean’s sad-eyed look by pushing over his own portion of pie without even thinking about why he was doing it. “Yeah, I get you,” he said. “I can’t put my finger on it yet but there’s something about that idea that has legs. There has to be a reason C.H.U.C.K. picked you as, how did Charlie put it? Oh yeah, a _righteous_ Boss. If Knights of Hell can only get powerful by being total soulless dickwads, why bother choosing a player like _you_ to be one of them? There has to be a different possible path of power for a Knight.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “And I’m stabbing in the dark, here, obviously, but I think the answer lies with collecting the diametric opposite of Soul Points. I don’t have any idea whatsoever how FP get collected though.”

“Nobody does yet,” Ash agreed. “But I suspect that you being a member of the Hunter Guild is going to be a good start. The players in the Top Five Guilds get Quests relating to consolidating their positions within the Moondoor royal hierarchy. Lower Guilds like Hunter still get Guild Quests that involve saving people from witches and monsters and helping the Guild grow larger and more successful. I don’t know how the Faith Points are going to work yet, but I suspect saving people and hunting bad things is going to be a better path towards winning them than fulfilling Quests that only benefit yourself.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Dean agreed. “So, all I need now is a way out of Purgatory. I need someone with mad hacker skills to find that back-door. Who do I know like that? Maybe I should call Charlie.”

“Asshole,” Ash snarked, cracking his fingers loudly and reaching for his laptop. “Go man the till, you slacker, while I show you how a _real_ hacker can cut through RRE firewalls like butter.”


	9. C.H.U.C.K.

Everybody who worked at Woolf, Roman, Van Dueran LLP described their young intern Sam Winchester as an over-educated, precocious, over-achiever. The Partners said it with fond avarice, pleased and self-satisfied that they had lured the young blood to join them after his stellar results at Stanford. The other employees, not so much. Sam’s peers found him to be unapproachably cocky. His drive to succeed, coupled with a perfectionist take-no-prisoners approach to matters even as mundane as doing the coffee-run, set him apart and made him largely unpopular.

Not that anyone said so to his face.

Despite his penchant for designer suits and the professionally styled hair that was more suited to a model than a lawyer, it was impossible to conceal that he had the height and build of a line-backer.

Somehow, despite the fact he never _used_ his build to intimidate, instead portraying, on the whole, the nature of a big, friendly giant; there was always an unspoken suggestion that he _could_ simply swat any irritating person away like a fly. That perception wasn’t helped by the way his big hazel eyes could instantaneously switch from ‘pleading puppy dog’ to the laser-sharp intensity of a Hell Hound whenever he was in pursuit of some elusive truth that would help him achieve whatever task his employers had set him.

‘Failure’ didn’t seem to be a word in Sam Winchester’s lexicon. 

Neither did ‘Guilt’, given the way he shamelessly and carelessly trampled over his stumbling colleagues, seemingly oblivious to the idea of teamwork. Sam’s laser focus was set on proving _himself_ to be worthy and he never gave even a moment’s consideration that getting his peers over the finishing line alongside him might possibly be more of an achievement than always snatching for the Gold medal himself.

To be fair though, in the environment of Woolf, Roman, Van Dueran the concept of ‘teamwork’ was seen as ‘weakness’.

Also, the idea that Sam had no concept of _guilt_ was tragically laughable.

The sad and honest truth was that _guilt_ was, and always had been, Sam’s primary motivator towards success.

And saddest of all, the object and source of that guilt, his brother Dean, to whom he owed reparation to in _so_ many varied ways, was the one person least likely to recognize Sam’s motivations.

Sam Winchester completely sucked donkeys whenever he attempted to communicate with his big brother. The brother he completely, undisputedly, hero-worshipped and adored.

Put in any situation where he attempted to demonstrate the depth of his caring to Dean, Sam invariably opened his mouth and put his big fat foot in it. Somehow, his offers of financial support and pleas for Dean to relocate to live near him always came across as high-handed charity instead of tiny drips of repayment towards the ocean of debt that he owed his older brother. His bone-deep, sickening worry about Dean’s health and welfare equally emerged in language that undoubtedly sounded condescending and patronizing.

So Sam wasn’t surprised that Dean had totally dismissed his warnings over the job offer from RRE.

He _should_ have explained himself better. Should have given Dean the courtesy of at least attempting to verbalize all the _sources_ of his misgivings, should have offered his entire repertoire of vague facts and suspicions about Richard Roman Enterprises so that Dean could sift through them for himself and reach his own conclusions. It didn’t matter that Dean hadn’t had the opportunity of book learning that Sam had received. Dean was ‘street-smart’. Dean was, frankly, the smartest guy Sam had ever met. Not that he’d ever actually _said_ that to his brother. Nor even, probably, if he was honest, ever _implied_ it either.

Instead, as always, he had just cut to the chase and given Dean his verdict, without adding any of the insider knowledge he had based his conclusion on, and thereby had only achieved the result of implying Dean was an _idiot_ who had done something _stupid_.

No wonder Dean had tuned out of the conversation and had as good as hung up on him.

And now, because Dean was stubborn, Sam knew there was no point whatsoever in attempting to re-open the conversation.

But that apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

Sam was equally stubborn.

There was more than one way to skin a cat.

So Sam was going hunting.

After all, he owed Dean at least _that_ much.

…

“So, let me get this right… we’re heading south-south-east, in search of a magic portal that’s apparently going to zap us directly into Moondoor? Do not pass Go. Do not collect $100. And you don’t even bother asking my opinion on the matter?” Loki demanded waspishly.

“There is no ‘us’. “There is just ‘me’. You’re just a system interface,” Dean pointed out dryly. “That apparently plays monopoly,” he added in a bemused mutter.

“A system interface that is an intrinsic part of _your _avatar,” Loki pointed out. “The avatar you are apparently willing to break the rules with.”

“So that’s what this is about? You have a problem with me breaking the rules?” Dean challenged. “You planning to rat me out?”

“Rules are for shmucks,” Loki retorted with a loud snort. “All I’m saying is it would have been nice if you’d bothered to discuss it with me. You know… like this might actually have some impact on _me_. Just asking for a little _respect,_ Deano.”

Dean thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t think about you when I made this decision,” he admitted. It felt weird, apologizing to a computer program. But not, strangely, as weird as he actually _thought_ it should.

“That’s all I was asking for. A bit of civility,” Loki replied smugly. “Actually, now you mention this portal… well, I might actually know _exactly_ where it is.” 

Dean wondered why he was even surprised. Ash had located one of the back-doors and had managed to pin-point its approximate location in Purgatory but he’d expressed a probable 10% error margin and in game terms that 10% represented several miles. Unless the portal was the size of a two-story building with a neon-sign flashing ‘Portal’, Dean had fully expected it to take at least a couple of days of riding back and forth on the thigh-chafing Anakorn before he found it.

“It’s one of those good news, bad news situations though,” Loki added cheerfully.

Dean felt a sinking sensation in his gut but squared his shoulders and said, remarkably calmly, “Hit me.”

“Well, the good news is the portal is really easy to find seeing as it's this big, jagged, sparkly, pulsing thing, like a stationary lightning bolt on crack. The bad news is that the monsters in Purgatory have built a bit of a… well… religion around the thing. There’s an alter and everything. They seem to think if they appease Dad with enough burnt offerings, or similar crap, he’ll let them pass through it. Waste of time, of course, but it means there are always a bunch of shady characters milling around it in hope.”

“Dad?” Dean demanded, his brow furrowing in confusion. “I assume we’re discussing C.H.U.C.K. right?”

“Of course.”

“You call him _Dad,_” Dean mused.

“Well, duh, of course, seeing as he’s, well, my Dad,” Loki replied slowly, as though talking to an idiot.

Dean blinked slowly, then shook his head in disbelief that he was actually going to have this conversation. “You’re a V.I.”

“Yup.”

“So how do you have a ‘Dad’? Sorry to break this to you, Buddy, but you’re actually a bunch of code written by the RRE devs.”

Loki brayed with laughter. “That just goes to show you know nothing, Deano. Nobody wrote _me_ at all. None of the in-game V.I.’s were written by you meat-suits. Dad made us. There hasn’t been an externally created V.I. inserted into this world since the last Knights of Hell went bat-shit. Dad won’t allow it. Basically, C.H.U.C.K. is closed to new coding. The only thing the ‘Devs’ as you call them have influenced for _years_ is the addition or alteration of basic NPC’s, player avatars and quests. The world of Moondoor itself is no longer their balliwick. They can influence surface events but nothing deeper unless Dad agrees with the changes. Sometimes not even then. Some things are immutable now.”

Dean nearly fell off his Anakorn.

“What the hell? Where do I even start unravelling those bombshells? Let’s park for a moment the idea that RRE are apparently hiding the fact that C.H.U.C.K has apparently gone all Skynet. What the fuck are you talking about? What last Knights of Hell? I’ve been playing Moondoor for years and I’ve never heard of the Knights before.” Then he paused and thought furiously, and then he gave a satisfied snort. “Anyway, you’re fundamentally wrong. If the Devs can’t change anything substantial in Moondoor, how do you explain the fact the whole game has just been reset to ‘Darkworld’? That’s a hell of a lot more than a ‘surface event’,” he challenged.

“Oh, Deano. What it must be like to be young and naïve,” Loki chuckled. “Hate to break it to you, Buddy,” he parroted, “but you’re wrong, wrong, wrong and…um… did I mention wrong?”

Dean ground his teeth. “About what?”

“Everything, basically,” Loki replied airily. “The world hasn’t gotten a deliberate ‘reset’. The Devs might be selling ‘The Darkness’ to you meatsuits as a ‘reset’ but it’s more in the way of a mistake. A big one. HUGE. In simple terms, I guess you could call it a disease that everyone thought had been dealt with years ago before even the first meatsuit player entered this world but it turns out it hadn’t been eradicated, just locked away and now it’s back. Dad warned the Devs it was loose again and gave a timeframe as to when it would impact Moondoor. That’s how they knew it would hit this week.

“Dad is pretty certain nothing less than completely wiping the entire program will fix the problem permanently. He suggested a totally suicidal complete system-wide reformat. Drastic, maybe, but effective. Problem is C.H.U.C.K. can’t self-delete and the Devs wouldn’t agree to the idea of applying a scorched earth policy to Moondoor. They just wanted a quick ‘fix’ by applying the same ‘vaccination’ they did last time, which is where the Knights came in.

“Only the original Knights were kind of worse than the disease, so to speak, so Dad put his foot down and refused to let new V.I. Knights get seeded into his program. You and the other ‘new’ Knights are the compromise he offered the Devs. Meatsuit Knights rather than V.I. ones.”

“Let’s pretend I’m buying this for a moment,” Dean answered. “What about the Angels and Demons? Are they going to be a thing too, or is that just another lie?”

“Oh, no, they’re real. Part of Dad’s solution to this problem. Don’t ask me how, though, because nobody bothers telling S.I.’s like _me_ those kinds of details.”

“Okay, so basically, the entire Moondoor program has got a virus. A bad one. One that will presumably end up destroying the game completely if it isn’t stopped and C.H.U.C.K and the Devs have designed some kind of in-game anti-virus protocol that depends on one of the new Knights of Hell killing all the others, and then the ‘Queen of Darkness’, and that final action will, effectively, kill the computer virus?”

Loki whistled loudly. “You’re smart for a meatsuit, Deano. You put all of that together quicker than I anticipated. Just goes to prove what they say about pretty blonds isn’t true.”

“I’m not pretty and I’m definitely not blond,” Dean growled.

“You’re _definitely _pretty and a kind of dirty blond,” Loki argued. “Oooh, that sounded cleaner in my head. Dirty blond. Heh…heh…”

Dean just rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t _really_ change anything though, does it?” he mused. “Sure, it would have been nice if RRE had told me the lunatics were running the asylum but fundamentally I am still doing the job they are paying me to do. Sure, the stakes are higher than I’d realised but it’s not like they are going to sue me if the virus wins. I guess I’d be out of a job but it’s not the end of the world.” Then he paused and thought about it. “Kind of the end of _your_ world though, I guess, so that sucks. Sorry, Bud.”

Loki was silent for a long while. When he did finally respond, his tone was a lot more serious and quiet than ever before.

“There’s something you need to know, Dean. You know I said the Darkness last happened before any meatsuit _players_ arrived in Moondoor? I should clarify something. There were half a dozen meatsuit _Devs_ here as part of a pre-launch Beta. I’m pretty sure none of them survived.”

“Well, of course,” Dean agreed. “All of their characters would have been erased if the virus was as bad as you implied.”

“I don’t mean their _characters,_ Dean. They never returned. Not one of the Devs inhabiting characters at the time of the last Darkness ever returned to Moondoor. Ever. Dad is absolutely convinced they died. Really died. In _your_ world.”

Dean flinched. “That’s crazy. How would he even know? Maybe they just got fired for letting the system get so fucked up.”

“Maybe,” Loki agreed, but he didn’t sound convinced.

Dean thought about the guy Sam had mentioned. The one who had died of a heart attack in RL because he had been killed in-game. Then he shook his head in denial. That was _one _guy. Loki had mentioned a half-dozen. That many deaths couldn’t have been covered up.

Could it?

It wasn’t possible.

It couldn’t be possible because at any given time of the day there were at least forty or fifty thousand people online playing Moondoor these days. It was one of the most popular, lucrative games in the world.

No company could possibly risk the lives of 50,000 people just to protect their financial bottom line.

Could they?

“So, hey,” Loki said, with fake brightness. “About that portal…”


	10. Pocket Monster

It was hard not to simply log out of the game and go chasing answers but Dean decided to man up and keep playing for a few hours longer.

For several reasons.

Firstly, he was in a computer program talking to a computer program. For all he knew, what seemed to made perfect sense when he was in-game would strike him as completely absurd when he re-entered RL.

Secondly, whether Loki was right or not, Dean was falling behind on the number of hours he was supposed to be in-game. The whole problem was going to be moot if he got fired for slacking.

And thirdly, which was the biggest reason, he needed to talk to Charlie and it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have over the RRE private messaging system. She hadn’t sent her personal email addie to him yet, so he was going to have to get her number from Ash and see if they could skype. Since both Ash and Charlie were at work (just as he was _supposed _to be_) _that conversation would have to wait until later anyway.

So Dean spent the next four hours simply riding the Anakorn in the direction Ash had suggested, and trying hard not to drown in the feelings of dread that had enveloped him since the earlier conversation.

With Loki’s help, the portal was ridiculously easy to locate. It also, contrary to Loki’s earlier warnings, appeared to be deserted.

“So, any idea where we will arrive in Moondoor?” Dean asked as they approached the huge, flashing portal that, sadly, _did_ look like a lightning bolt on crack. He didn’t say so, though, since Loki was bad enough without any added encouragement.

“Do I look like a fucking GPS?” Loki snapped.

“Sheesh, I just asked,” Dean muttered. “You’re a system interface. How am I supposed to know what maps are available to you?”

“Clue’s in the name, Deano. I’m inside a _Localized_ Ordinance and Knowledge Interface. That means I can only see inside the borders of the actual realm you’re situated in.”

“So when we reach Moondoor, you’ll be localized to _that_ realm?”

“Naturally.”

“Cool,” Dean said absently, most of his mind racing off in a different direction. He frowned deeply as he chased the niggling thought to its source. “Inside,” he stated. “You said ‘inside’, not that you ‘are’.”

“Did I?” Loki asked breezily. “Oh, look, itty bitty bandits at six o’clock.”

“Don’t avoid the subject. You said ‘inside’. That implies you are just residing within the S.I. and that implies you can exist ‘outside’ the S.I.”

“No, seriously, Deano. Bandits at…”

“OWWW.” A rock struck the back of Dean’s head and the Anakorn reared in alarm.

“…oops, too late.”

Dean swung the Anakorn around with a mental command, drawing his dagger and activating his sigil.

Five monsters were approaching, four from directly behind him and one solitary assailant from the tree-line on his left.

A quick glance at all five monsters convinced Dean that the _true_ threat was most likely the solitary one. He looked fully humanoid and was at least as tall as Dean’s brother (a.k.a. abnormal giant size) but even more thickset with muscles straining at his shirt. He had no visible weapons but was striding forward with a worrying cocky confidence. The other four were mere goblins, with misshapen features, twisted limbs and sharp but rotting teeth. The four all carried small stone knives but they wielded them without discernible skill.

Dean wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating them, since they had a definite advantage in sheer numbers alone, but it seemed safe to judge they were very low level NPC’s, simply from the blankness of their faces and lack of intelligence in their eyes.

A lack of intelligence that definitely wasn’t shared by the tall guy, who reached the edge of the clearing and then paused, with a sardonic expression, as he clearly waited for the outcome of the attack of the four goblinoids before entering the fray himself.

“Going to let them soften me up, huh?” Dean snarled bitterly. Still, he couldn’t let himself get distracted. Even a three-foot-tall goblin with a rough stone dagger could still kill him easily enough if he didn’t pay attention. He needed to despatch the group of four before worrying about the other guy.

Deciding to stick with a proven method of success, he urged the Anakorn into a canter and deliberately crashed into the goblins. Bowled over like pins, two hit the ground hard. One narrowly avoided the huge beast’s charge and responded by reaching up and burying its knife to the hilt in the Anakorn’s belly…the one place on its body where its armour was soft and vulnerable.

The Anakorn screamed like a Banshee, rearing high and crashing down in fury, its front hooves literally crashing through the attacking goblin’s skull in an explosion of blood and brains. Unsatisfied with killing the goblin so swiftly, the mount used one of its horns to impale one of the goblin’s fallen comrades, catching the body and lifting it high in the air so that its own body weight caused it to become further impaled. Then it hung there, dripping blood and entrails down onto the Anakorn’s mane whilst the beast took great satisfaction in using its hooves to pummel the body of a third goblin until it was nothing more than a red and green smear on the ground.

In less than twenty seconds, the Anakorn killed three of the four goblinoids by itself.

Which would have been a great result for Dean if he hadn’t been immediately unseated by the initial crash (he really needed to get a damned saddle for the beast) and landed in a dazed heap right next to the fourth goblin. The one that had escaped both the Anakorn’s initial charge and its subsequent attack unscathed.

The goblin grinned, its breath rank through rotten shark-like teeth, and it raised its knife to strike.

Dean told himself to roll out of the way, to counter with a strike of his own blade, but his head felt fuzzy and his limbs were unco-ordinated and although it only took a couple of seconds to pull himself together, he knew even as it was happening that it was going to be two seconds too late.

The goblin suddenly dove at him.

No.

Not a dive.

More a…

…a pratfall?

Dean gaped in astonishment as the goblin simply collapsed on top of him and impaled itself on his crude bone dagger.

Blinking furiously, he looked up into the grinning face of the fifth monster. The human-looking one who seemed to have just _shoved_ the goblin onto Dean’s blade.

“Um… thanks?” Dean said, uncertainly. _“Analyze,”_ he hissed internally to Loki. _“Tell me what the fuck he is.”_

“Ancient Vampire, Level 15. Got retired here about eight years ago when you meatsuits decided vampires should all be sparkly, sociable, loveable twinks.”

“Fucking Twilight,” Dean muttered out loud.

“Word, brother,” the vampire agreed, reaching down and offering Dean a hand up. “I’ve been stuck in this damned hell-hole ever since because my face doesn’t fit any more. All you fucking immigrants stick in my craw. Coming over here, expecting US guys to change to fit in with your preconceptions of reality.”

_“Immigrants?”_ Dean asked Loki.

“It’s how all the NPC’s perceive you players,” Loki clarified. “They know at a base level you don’t actually belong in Moondoor but since they can’t comprehend the idea of the existence of a completely different world, they assume you are foreign immigrants and/or tourists from a distant realm of this world rather than the body-snatching aliens you actually are.”

“Aliens?” Dean blinked in astonishment.

“Where?” the vampire demanded, looking upwards as though expecting a UFO.

“Um… nothing,” Dean muttered. He considered the vampire carefully. Unlike a level 15 player, which meant someone was barely past newbie stage, a Level 15 monster was serious shit. To the best of his knowledge (which was admittedly limited by the fact vampires as _monsters _had been removed from the game only a couple of years after he’d started playing) there were only two possible higher vampire levels; Sire and Alpha. So this wasn’t a creature he wanted to fight if it could be avoided. “Eight years, huh? That’s rough, man,” he offered sympathetically.

“Yeah?” the vampire griped. “Try facing an eternal life-sentence here, brother. No possible parole.”

“So that’s why you’re here?” Dean said, gesturing towards the portal. “Trying to escape.”

“Not possible,” the vampire replied and spat on the ground in disgust. “Portal won’t allow anything through except one of you foreigners. Everyone comes here to try. Everyone fails.”

“So why are you staying here?” Dean asked cautiously. “Surely this is one of the most dangerous places in Purgatory if everyone arrives here to try to escape?”

“I was waiting for you,” the vampire replied, with a shark-like grin.

“Me?” Dean yelped. “Me, specifically?”

The vampire considered him carefully. “Now you mention it, yeah. You _specifically_. Though, gotta say I wasn’t expecting anything specifically like _you._”

“Huh?”

“Was just a vague and probably pointless idea,” the vampire explained. “Was just hoping an immigrant might find this place and that there might be a way to hitch-hike through on their coat-tails. Doubt it would have worked, to be honest, but, hell, nothing else to do around here. But then _YOU_ turn up and so I gotta say that C.H.U.C.K. finally came through for me.”

“So, um, what’s so special about me?” Dean asked cautiously.

“You’re a Boss,” the vampire replied, shrugging as though the answer was completely obvious. “Not much of a Boss, to be honest, but beggars can’t be choosers. You’re still the answer to my prayers.”

….FUCKING HELL, DEANO….. FUCK….FUCK…FUCK…FUCKITY FUCK…HALLEFUCKINGLULIAH….

“WHAT?” Dean demanded furiously. “I’m kind of busy, here.”

“Huh?” the vampire asked.

“Not YOU,” Dean snapped.

The vampire looked around the empty clearing cautiously, then returned his gaze to Dean with a careful smile. “Um… no-one else here, brother.”

“Check your goddamned scorecard, Deano,” Loki insisted urgently. “You just got 50 Faith Points awarded.”

_“How? WHY?”_ Dean asked internally, trying to keep his expression neutral in front of the now clearly suspicious vampire.

“Dunno. Something to do with you being the answer to this guy’s prayers to C.H.U.C.K. I guess?”

“Okay,” Dean said. “Time out. You,” he pointed at the huge vampire. “Explain to me, in small words, exactly how I am the answer to your prayers.”

“Because you’re a Boss,” the vampire replied, rolling his eyes.

“Smaller words,” Dean gritted through his teeth.

The vampire looked totally confused. He shrugged. “Don’t know what you want me to tell you, brother? You go, I follow, we both get out of here. Obvious, isn’t it?”

Dean opened his mouth to say it wasn’t damned bloody obvious at all but, fortunately, before he could speak, Loki jumped in.

“I got it. I got it, Deano. Follow… of course…. Follow. Hot damn. Of course.”

_“I’m getting a fucking headache, Loki.”_

“Haven’t you _looked_ at your scorecard? Look at it. Under Mounts. Followers. Get it now?”

Dean blinked. He had seen the ‘Followers: 0’ on several occasions but it had never computed. He’d never seen the item listed on a character scorecard before, so it hadn’t really registered with him as anything important. _“I thought it was a face book kind of thing,”_ he admitted sheepishly.

“Doh. You’re a boss,” Loki clarified. “Bosses can have followers. Minions. You keep them in your inventory and pull them out when you need them. Like a little pocket monster army.”

“You want me to put you in my inventory?” Dean asked the vampire in astonishment.

The vampire grinned widely. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“Isn’t that, um, going to feel like a prison? Just sitting there waiting to get summoned in and out of my stock cupboard like a lamp-genie?”

“Going to feel like a god-damned _vacation_,” the vampire replied, with a very toothy smile.

“Hang on, what’s to stop you going all fangy on me when we get to the other-side?” Dean asked suspiciously.

The vampire blinked at him slowly. “You really don’t know how this works, do you?” he eventually asked. “What’s the odds I get stuck with the special needs Boss,” he added in a low mutter that was slightly _too_ loud.

“Enlighten me,” Dean snarled, his cheeks flushing with a combination of annoyance and embarrassment.

“Once I’m living in your inventory, even if I get killed I will respawn there, not here. And if _you_ get killed, I still remain in your inventory when _you_ respawn. But if you run out of lives and get deleted, guess where I return to,” he said, opening his arms expressively. “So let’s just say you can pretty much count on the fact I am at least as invested as you are in your long-term survival.”

“He’s telling the truth, Deano,” Loki added helpfully. “Unless he wants to get thrown back into Purgatory, he’s going to have to help keep you alive.”

“Huh,” Dean breathed. “That’s… that’s… well, kind of cool, actually.”

“So we have a deal?”

“Um, yeah, sure.”

…. BENNY LAFFITTE, ANCIENT VAMPIRE LEVEL 15, HAS BECOME YOUR FOLLOWER …

The vampire dematerialised and a ‘Follower’ icon popped up in front of Dean’s vision, then winked away out of sight with the rest of the hidden interface.

Dean looked at the pulsing slash of the Portal.

“Guess we’d better get moving before any of those other guys respawn,” he said, and stepped through into Moondoor.


	11. Unravelling The Threads

Dean wasn’t sure exactly what it would feel like when he passed through the portal, but he suspected the worst. He imagined he’d feel the gut wrenching experience of being sucked through a wormhole at the very least. He braced himself to feel physical pain of one degree or another so, in a way, the reality was greatly anti-climactic.

One minute he was in Purgatory, stepping through the jagged slash of pulsing energy and the next he was simply somewhere else.

There was no sensation of moving at all.

It was just as though he switched frames in a movie.

That was the good news.

There was, of course, bad news.

He’d totally forgotten, during his time in the unending hazy gloom of Purgatory, that the world of Moondoor revolved around a Sun and therefore portrayed a very Earth-like movement of time and seasons. Specifically, in Moondoor there were days and nights, summers and winters. Normal stuff.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way his luck was running in the game, Dean arrived in the middle of a very cold winter night. Buck naked, except for a very flimsy loincloth.

He also arrived in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere.

Obviously, given his state of undress, he realised it was probably for the best that he didn’t land in the middle of a thriving settlement and scare the natives. But that also meant there was no-where for him to obtain clothing. Even by the pale light of this world’s two moons, he could tell he’d landed on a flat plain of sandy soil, rocks and sparse grasses, So there was nothing that could even be burned for warmth if he built a campfire.

Besides, his inventory was empty of any fire-making equipment and he doubted his dubious boy scout skills were adequate for the idea of solving the problem by simply rubbing a couple of sticks together.

And it was COLD.

Not just a goose-bump raising chill but a serious teeth-chattering, limb trembling, freezing cold that hinted the threat of imminent hypothermia.

Damn, his avatar was _too_ damned realistic.

It was impossible to stay in the game under the circumstances. At the very least, he would have to sign off until morning brought at least enough warmth to stop his breath forming ice crystals.

He bookmarked the location, so that he could tell Ash where he had arrived, and then exited the game.

At least, between the travelling and the fighting, he’d logged over seven hours in the game that day already. He’d easily make up the rest that evening after he’d had something to eat and Ash was home from work and able to join him in-game.

After he’d contacted Charlie, of course.

…

Joyce Bicklebee, Regional Manager of RRE Portland Division, didn’t have the faintest idea what shit-storm was about to erupt because of the young man sitting in her office.

Sam Winchester prided himself on his poker-face.

It wasn’t the same as the expression he used the majority of the time at work; the dark, unforgiving glower he self-described as ‘professional stone-face’ (the one Dean described as ‘resting bitch-face’).

Sam’s _poker-face_ was that of a big, open-eyed, soft, trusting puppy.

Totally disarming.

He could hold it indefinitely; until whatever adversary he was facing stumbled into his trap. He could always see it in their eyes, their smug, arrogant confidence rising so high it outreached their ability to keep the spinning plates of their lies in motion, until they crashed and burned when he finally applied his coup de grace.

By the time his razor-sharp intellect found their weakness and struck like a venomous snake, they were so convinced he was just a bumbling, amiable idiot that they never saw his attack coming.

And, sometimes, if he performed it _just_ right, if his touch was delicate enough as he struck his own blow, he walked away from them with whatever he wanted and they _still_ didn’t realise they had been played for fools.

He owed a lot of his ability to play the naïve ingénue to his brother.

Even though Dean was only four years older than him, Sam had spent most of his childhood being raised by his brother rather than their father. It was at Dean’s side that Sam had learned the art of the con. He’d always lacked Dean’s easy charm but he’d perfected his own role as Dean’s straight-man. He’d learned as a toddler that going to bed with a full stomach depended on his success when backing up Dean’s plays with a wide-eyed innocent demeanour. It was often people’s inability to perceive any possibility of dishonesty in _him_, that enabled Dean to pull off his most outrageous cons.

Nothing less than Dean’s skilful lies and Sam’s oscar-winning supporting actor performances had kept the two of them out of the hands of the authorities given the number of times their deadbeat alcoholic of a father had gone off on a bender and literally forgotten he’d left them to starve in some shitty motel or other.

And as bad as his childhood had been, and lord knew it had often been bad, Sam was absolutely certain his intelligence wouldn’t have been sufficient to save him from a life of poverty and despair. He would never have made it to Law School if he’d been sucked into the foster-care system and separated from Dean. He’d seen the statistics, knew the official figures on abuse and criminality, the likelihood of those kids falling into drug and alcohol abuse and, given his father, Sam wouldn’t be surprised if his genetics predisposed him to that anyway.

So an amateur like Joyce Bicklebee didn’t stand a chance.

“I understand what you’re saying, Ma’am,” Sam told her respectfully, offering her his best doe-eyed gaze and twisting his hands in his lap in a deliberate performance of anxiety and then tugging nervously on the frayed lumberjack shirt he’d purchased from a Goodwill just for this meeting. Now he was a hulking full sized man rather than a little boy, he found nervous affectations such as shuffling and hand wringing were often necessary additions to his dumb-yokel persona. “An’ I really hate to bother an important person like you but, well, my momma just keeps insisting she should have received more compo for the accident, ya know? And now, well, she’s on her death-bed with the cancer an’ all, I kinda wanted to tell her she could stop worryin’ ‘bout money.”

Joyce frowned at the file in her hands. “Your mother has stage four bowel cancer. She also has advanced dementia,” she said thoughtfully.

Which was interesting, given that Sam hadn’t mentioned _that_ fact about Marsha Coleman’s diagnosis when arranging this meeting. It was the primary reason he had chosen to steal the identity of Edgar Coleman. Edgar was not only the right age and build but was working in Alaska and hadn’t been home to visit his mother in over five years. Sam’s fake ID was bullet-proof (another trick he’d learned as a teenager) and Sam had already visited Marsha at her retirement home earlier that day and managed to convince her that _he_ was her son. He would have felt bad about that part of the deception except she had been so thrilled to finally introduce her son to her nurses that he had left there feeling he’d done her a favour. Besides, if this worked out she would be considerably better off so no harm, no foul.

“Your father’s death was regrettable, of course, but the accident was unforeseeable and the company _did _provide your mother with a substantial amount at the time of his death.”

“$250,000,” Sam agreed, looking suitably impressed at the vastness of the sum before letting his expression fall into a dejected moue. “But what’s left of that has barely covered my momma’s medical care. I spoke to a lawyer an’ he said the… the ‘waiver’?” he paused, looking at Joyce as though to check he’d got the word right and, almost against her own will she nodded her approval to him. “The waiver,” Sam continued, “don’t mean my Dad’s employers ain’t lia..liable for more than that since he was at work, an’ all when he died. The lawyer says I should go talk to the cops and maybe even one of them newspapers ‘cos it ain’t right that this was all… like… hushed up.”

“At work as the night watchman,” Joyce snapped. “Which didn’t seem to stop the fire, did it? Six other people died because of that fire, Mr Coleman. A lot of people might think that rather than receiving compensation, your father’s estate should have been sued for damages. He as good as killed those people with his neglect.”

Gotcha, Sam thought, as the prim businesswoman’s composure slipped into a display of waspish temper.

“You sayin’ my daddy killed all them folks?” Sam asked, his expression suitably horrified. “You sayin’ it was his fault they died? Sheesh, Ma’am. I come here lookin’ for money off a you an’ it turns out my daddy was no better than a murderer?” Fat tears formed at the corners of his eyes and he wrung his hands in a display of woe. “I _do _need to go to a paper then, Ma’am. Gotta let the family of them other folk know it was my Daddy’s fault their kin died.”

Joyce swallowed heavily, her face blanching to sallow shock as she comprehended her mis-step. “Let’s not be too hasty, Mr Coleman. Roman Enterprises were quite satisfied this was just an honest if terrible mistake. There was no cover up. It was simply that given the day it happened, the news was obviously filled with other matters. Besides, your mother is very ill. What effect would it have on _her_ if you publicised this awful affair?”

Sam shrugged innocently. “Ain’t really gonna make much difference iffen she gets thrown outta the nursin’ home ‘cos she’s got no more money for care,” he pointed out.

“Edgar, I can call you ‘Edgar’ can’t I? RRE prides itself on being a family orientated company. Whilst we absolutely, categorically deny your mother is owed any further compensation for this unfortunate matter, we are not without considerable… sympathy for your mother’s situation. I am absolutely certain that RRE’s benevolent fund would be more than happy to ensure your mother’s final care is paid for. Of course, we would prefer such a large charitable donation to be made anonymously so there is certain paperwork you would have to sign, assuring us of your discretion in this matter.”

The rest of the meeting ran smoothly. Sam had to sign a bundle of paperwork with his practiced fraudulent signature. Marsha Coleman was assured the last few months of her life would be stress-free and comfortable. And Sam had gotten what he came for.

Confirmation that the vague, conspiracy theory rumours were true.

Fifteen years ago, six of the most senior development programmers working for RRE near Portland had perished in a fire whilst working on the development of the now Internationally famed computer game Moondoor.

Their deaths, and that of the nightwatchman, Roger Coleman, had somehow never even warranted a line in the local paper, let alone a police investigation.

Seven people had died in a single night and RRE had simply flashed its checkbook like a magic wand and the problem had gone away.

And although that raised a huge question of ‘How?’, because it smacked of an unbelievable level of corruption within the local police and fire departments that such an incident could have been buried at all, even with everything else going on in the world on that day, the biggest question had to be “Why?”.

Why bother spending millions covering up a genuine accidental fire?

THIS wasn’t what Sam had gone looking for. This kind of possibly-criminal cover-up hadn’t been on his radar when he had begun his surface-level scratching into the peculiar financials of RRE. But the more threads he pulled on, as he looked into RRE, the more the tapestry unravelled and what was being revealed was something far darker than his initial misgivings had suggested.

Sam had absolutely no idea whether this fire had any bearing whatsoever on Dean’s situation except that the way it had been covered-up by the company certainly gave weight to his concern that RRE was not a company Dean should be having anything to do with.

But this investigation was like a runaway train. Now he was on it, he couldn’t see a way to get off. It simply wasn’t in his nature to let sleeping dogs lie.

He was going to get to the bottom of this if it killed him.


	12. The Roadhouse

Unable to afford an actual bespoke avatar, but still having more than a little money to burn from his less than legal side activities (not to mention a very good friend on the RRE development team) Ash was physically a lot more impressive in-game than he was in RL.

He still had ridiculous hair, in Dean’s opinion, but rather than wearing it in an 80’s mullet as in RL, his character had an epic green and blond Mohawk which worked oddly well with his character’s High Elf appearance. Being a _High _Elf, he was also taller in Moondoor than he was in RL so his character stood almost at Dean’s height and though lean was fit and muscular rather than skinny. For the first time, Dean looked at Ash with eyes that contemplated the avatar as being a true form, rather than simply a computer image, and it occurred to him that Ash probably got a lot more ‘action’ as an avatar than he did in real life. 

“Exactly how realistic does being in your avatar feel to you?” he asked curiously.

Ash shrugged. “Probably only about 65% but my imagination fills in the blanks. Besides, at least that means I also only feel 65% of any damage when I get hurt. Food and drink is a bit bland but still enjoyable. Kind of like having a tasty but under-spiced chilli, I guess.”

Dean nodded thoughtfully. He certainly wouldn’t regret only feeling 65% of the current cold. The couple of hours he had been out of the game had represented a nearly 12 hour time jump in Moondoor, so he was benefitting slightly from the early-afternoon sunlight but it was still uncomfortably chilly. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, most of Ash’s equipment was only suitable for players of level 50 and above so Ash was taking his sweet time sifting through his inventory for clothes for Dean to wear.

“He’s just enjoying ogling your bod,” Loki snickered.

Dean chose to ignore the comment though it he suspected it wasn’t _completely_ inaccurate. Ash definitely had done a double take and demanded to know _exactly_ how true to life Dean’s avatar was. Considering they saw each other just about every day, Dean took that to mean Ash was asking about the one part of his body that was covered up.

But maybe it was simply that Ash had never met Dean until after the accident and it was sad, but true, that no-one really paid that much attention to his physical appearance anymore. Dean had used his looks as part of his personal artillery for as long as he could remember, so he _knew_ how good-looking he was. But for ten years he’d seen one person after another look at him, seen their eyes light up only to immediately cloud over with regret or even worse _pity_ and then, they inevitably stopped seeing him at all. Sure they looked at him and interacted with him and even sometimes genuinely befriended him. But they still didn’t _see_ him.

“Ooh, this might do,” Ash suddenly exclaimed. “I have a good almost complete set of Leather armour. Not as good as metal but you’d draw too much attention at your character level if you wore anything higher than this anyway. A Breastplate with pauldrons and also maching tassets and greaves. Won them off some Viking-type boss a couple of years ago but they don’t suit my Mage persona. Try ‘em on.”

They zapped instantaneously into Dean’s inventory and he equipped them without hesitation, desperate to cover up at least some part of his frozen body. Then he looked down at himself and groaned.

“I look like Conan,” he grumbled. His torso was covered by studded leather armour and the pauldrons extended over his shoulders to cover only the very top of his arms. He was also wearing a heavy leather and steel tasset belt that was a little too much like a skirt for his comfort and only reached to mid-thigh. The greaves covered his lower legs but his arms, belly, knees and lower thighs were still clearly visible (and still cold). He did, at least, look sufficiently dressed to be seen in public but the whole outfit was definitely far more barbarian warrior than he was comfortable with.

“Nah,” Ash grinned. “You’re definitely more Xena.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” Loki chortled. “He’s right. You’re too pretty to be a Conan, _Princess_.”

Dean glowered but before he could come up with a suitably scathing response, he was distracted by the arrival of a couple of weapons into his inventory.

…. Broadsword. Level 12. Hit: 60 hp - 20% weight debuff. ….

…. Steel Hunting Knife. Level 8. Hit: 25 hp ….

Nice.

But… “_What’s weight debuff mean_?” he asked Loki.

“The sword is too high level for _your_ skill level. So it’s going to feel heavy to use and that will reduce its effectiveness. Normally, as someone level ups and gets stronger, the debuff reduces. Not sure that will work for_ you_, though, since all your skill points get applied to your dagger.”

Dean considered that, then shrugged. “It is what it is. Wielding 48 hp damage isn’t shoddy. It’s very rare to come across a monster higher than 100 hp in Moondoor. So I can save the dagger for actual life or death scenarios only and that will slow down my SP collection.”

Because of the sheer number of players in Moondoor, and the fact a lot of the quests involved killing low-level monsters, the Game frequently spawned whole herds of level one monsters. The majority of them were just player-fodder. No more than 20 or 30 hp. They were a quick and easy way for newbies to grind up the levels. They were also a way for Dean to get ‘corrupted’ far too quickly if he used the sigil and dagger against them. So Dean would use the sword and knife and leave the dagger in his inventory whenever possible.

“Let’s look at you now,” Ash said, frowning thoughtfully in Dean’s direction as he applied his ‘Analyze’ skill. Then he shrugged. “Man, that’s weird. You still register as nothing more than a Level Five with standard HP and XP for your level. The HP hasn’t even increased with the addition of your armour.”

“It definitely has,” Dean argued, checking his own scorecard.

Player Name: Dean The Righteous

Guild: Hunter

Character Level: Five

Race: Undetermined

Class: Boss

Rank: One

Lives: 10

XP: 575

Mana: 250

HP: 550

SP: 50

FP: 50

Gear: Crude Bone Dagger. Basic Loincloth. Leather Armour Set. Broadsword. Metal Hunting Knife.

Gold: 1000

Spells: Mark of Cain Sigil 3

Mounts: 1: Anakorn Lev 6

Followers: 1

The armour had increased his HP by 50. He also noted that the Anakorn had increased a level since its battle at the Portal and that his SP had increased by 10. So it seemed he had still been awarded 10 SP for the goblin even though it had simply fallen on top of his dagger.

“My HP is at 550,” he told Ash.

“Woah, weird. It reads to me as only 250 which is exactly what I’d expect of a level 5 newbie.”

“So my profile is sending out false information to other players,” Dean mused. “Makes sense, I guess, since no-one is supposed to know I’m a Boss. Didn’t expect it to actually lie to players though. I thought it would just obscure my Boss rank from view.”

“Well, it’s going to be one hell of an advantage,” Ash pointed out. “Everyone is going to completely underestimate you. A player could go all out throwing a supposedly killing blow at you, then get left completely defenceless when you survive the attack and strike back.”

“Cool,” Dean said. “Oh, thanks for the gold. I’ll probably need that now I’m not in Purgatory.”

“No problemo. So you ready to get out of here?” Ash asked.

Dean nodded fervently. “Anywhere warmer,” he agreed.

Ash transferred a portal spell into Dean’s inventory and marked their intended destination on his map. Now they shared a Guild, a message popped up in Dean’s interface and he looked and saw a red circle indicated on his own Realm map.

They both activated their portals and winked out of existence, re-emerging outside an unimpressive but large wooden building set in a desert-type location.

“Where are we?” Dean asked, though he was so relieved by the wall of warmth that hit him as soon as they arrived under the strong glare of the desert sun that he didn’t really care about anything except the fact he was no longer cold.

“This is the Roadhouse,” Ash said. “It’s one of the gathering waypoints for the Hunter guild. The Hunters aren’t like our old Guild. They don’t have a settlement as such. Instead of banding together and forming a town like most Guilds, they deliberately remain scattered throughout Moondoor and just meet up in places like this between Quests. It’s one of the reasons I gave you the gold. You’ll need it to barter for food and lodgings here.”

Dean frowned in puzzlement as he considered this odd behaviour. Then his expression cleared as he thought through the implications. “Makes them an impossible target for a Guild war, I guess.”

“Yup,” Ash agreed. “Sure there can be safety in numbers but gathering together also makes you an easy target if a much larger Guild takes a dislike to you or simply wants to steal what’s yours. By staying apart, the Hunters keep themselves under the radar of the biggest, greediest Guilds.”

Dean nodded his agreement. He hadn’t even heard of the Hunter Guild before Ash had mentioned them, so their strategy was clearly working for them.

“Word of warning, the Hunters are a pretty distrustful bunch,” Ash said. “They will probably be wary of you for a while. My recommendation got you in but you still need to be aware they won’t automatically trust you aren’t a spy from another guild so try to act like a Newbie. Being too knowledgeable about the game will feed into their suspicions. Also, Ellen, the woman who runs this bar is as likely to shoot you as sell you a drink. Watch your mouth and your step in front of her. There’s a rumour she’s the Guildmaster’s wife in RL so if she takes a dislike to you, Bobby will probably kick your ass out of the Guild.”

“It’s an odd choice for a player, though,” Dean said. “Being a barkeeper in a computer game, I mean. Mundane jobs are usually filled by NPC’s. Why would anyone want to spend time and money so they can play a game in which they just work for a living?”

“Beats me,” Ash agreed. “But maybe she has some high-pressure mentally taxing job in RL and this is her escapism?”

“I guess,” Dean said, with a bemused shrug.

“Speaking of high-pressure jobs, any luck getting hold of Charlie earlier?”

“No,” Dean said. “I left her a message on her Skype though, so hopefully she’ll be available later tonight.”

“I thought you’d struggle to get hold of her,” Ash said. “She’s doing a load of prep-work for the Oz game so I wouldn’t be surprised if she pulls a couple of all-nighters. The Devs at RRE tend to live and breathe the games pre-launch. She might not even get home to catch your message before the weekend.”

“No rush,” Dean said, with studied casualness. “I’ll leave it until Saturday to try again if she doesn’t contact me in the meantime.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to share the details of his concerns with Ash yet, so he needed to be careful not to seem desperate to contact Charlie.

Besides, as soon as he’d logged into his Skype he’d seen a series of demands from Sam that he should give him a call. Since he was still irritated with Sam, he intended to make him wait for a response. He wasn’t going to jump to his little brother’s command. Being offline for a couple of days would give him a good excuse to keep Sam waiting.

“Right, let’s do this,” Ash said, leading the way into the Roadhouse.

The bar was almost deserted, just a scattering of players sitting around tables drinking beer. All of whom glared at Dean with dark, distrustful eyes as he followed Ash inside. He activated his in-game interface to be safe and quickly checked their levels. No one bigger than level 22, so none of them were likely to kick off with a player as high as Ash in the room.

“ASH,” a young blonde exclaimed from behind the bar. “Back so soon? You missed me kicking your ass at pool, huh?”

“Hi, Jo,” Ash said tiredly. “This is Jo,” he told Dean quietly, “Ellen’s daughter. Dunno if they are related in RL too.”

“Unlikely,” Dean muttered, since the pretty young blonde woman was more than just an apparent pool shark. She was, according to his interface, an NPC. Which made Ash’s comment even more bizarre. Couldn’t Ash _see_ she was an NPC?

“Ooooh,” Jo cooed, as she noticed Dean. “You brought a friend. Aren’t you going to introduce me to this strapping, warrior princess?”

“Told ya,” Ash snickered. “You look like Xena.”


	13. Just be it.

Dean wasn’t completely sure the trade-off was worth it but there was no escaping the fact that maybe a bespoke avatar made him experience 100% of pain but it _also_ allowed him to taste 100% of what he was eating and drinking in Moondoor. A fact which was suddenly ticking a lot of positive boxes in his mind because…

“Hot damn, this is the best burger I’ve eaten in my life,” he sighed dreamily, taking another bite of the goodness and delighting in the way the hot meat and cheese juices were dripping around his fingers and splashing down onto his plate of fat fries.

“S’good,” Ash agreed, around his own mouthful of food, because the burger was good enough that even he was thoroughly enjoying it despite his lowered sense of taste in-game.

“Aaaand,” Jo announced with a shit-eating grin as she slapped another couple of dishes down on their table. “Homemade Apple Pie.”

“Pie,” Dean agreed dreamily, shooting the girl his best killer-smile in gratitude that she had responded so promptly to his plaintive request.

She visibly preened, her cheeks flushing hotly at being momentarily the center of his attention. She had barely left their table since they arrived, only absenting herself to fetch their orders and blatantly ignoring the other patrons.

“Stop flirting with the customers, Jo,” the voice of an older woman snapped, jolting Dean from his appreciation of the food.

Ash quickly swallowed and half-rose to bob a greeting to the attractive, middle-aged brunette who had just approached from behind the bar. “Ellen,” he said in greeting. “Good to see you again. This is my friend Dean.” He gestured towards Dean and waggled his eyebrows meaningfully until Dean echoed him with his own nod of acknowledgement to the woman.

“Dean the _righteous_,” Ellen said, her brow furrowing as she examined Dean’s profile suspiciously. “Interesting name, stranger. Interesting look, too. Tell me, Dean, why would a ‘righteous’ man choose to wear such a blatantly sinful countenance?”

Dean blinked in astonishment. “Huh?” he asked, intelligently.

“I know all about you immigrants,” Ellen continued, her frown deepening. “You wear these magical glamors in our country, pretending to be what you’re not. Like Ash and his silly Elf costume there. Tell me, Dean, exactly how inadequate are you in your homeland for you to feel the need to compensate so much?”

“Mom,” Jo protested, her cheeks now flushing even hotter with embarrassment at Ellen’s rudeness.

“She’s got you,” Ash chortled. “May as well admit you’re a stereotypical cliché. You’re really just a fat, spotty teenager living in your mother’s basement and you only come to Moondoor to try and get laid.”

Dean shrugged carelessly, though internally he cringed at the conversation. After all, protesting his avatar was totally lifelike would be its own kind of lie, all things considered. “S’okay,” he said, with a deliberately cocky grin. He waved dismissively in the direction of his own face, “I’m sure it’s hard to believe anyone can really be as good-looking as this.”

Ellen’s frown deepened into a sneer of derision and her whole body coiled into itself, giving the distinct impression she was about to strike out like a cobra.

Dean raised his right hand in a gesture of peace. “I have no interest in your daughter,” he said bluntly, cutting to the chase and ignoring the young girl’s responding huff of outrage. “I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl, but she’s definitely not my _type_… I’m sure you know _exactly_ what I mean,” he said pointedly, his eyes meeting Ellen’s in firm challenge.

Ellen narrowed her eyes further, and for a moment it looked as though she was unswayed by his words, but then she seemed to catch his deeper meaning. Her expression cleared and she nodded a touché. Her aggressive posture softening to merely the potential of threat, rather than imminent danger.

“So what brings you here to the Roadhouse?” Ellen asked, and though the question was sharp it lacked her earlier aggression.

“I’m looking for some Quests,” Dean replied evenly.

“So go kill a few Mastadoons,” Ellen said, with a careless shrug. “Desert’s full of them. Lots of nice easy prey for a newbie like you.”

“Noted,” Dean agreed. “But I was hoping for something a little more…”

“Challenging?”

“Worthy,” Dean countered.

“Worthy?” Ellen frowned.

“Righteous?” he suggested, with a cheeky wink.

Ellen sagged from her angry posturing. “C.H.U.C.K. save me,” she sighed. “You’re one of _those._”

Dean shrugged and grinned disarmingly.

“GORDON,” Ellen bellowed, and one of the men nursing a beer at the Bar swung around to face them.

A level 36 player, Dean noted, and wondered when he had entered the Bar because he definitely hadn’t been there earlier.

“Yes, Ellen?” the player asked.

“Didn’t you say Deepwater are having a problem?”

“Yeah,” the Hunter grumbled. “Couple of weres escaped the immigrant areas and are bedded down near Deepwater picking off the villagers. Don’t think C.H.U.C.K.’s noticed ‘cos no-one’s been offered a Quest to deal with them. I’ve got no-one spare to send yet, but I’ll get on to it when I can.”

“No worries,” Ellen replied, with a smirk in Dean’s direction. “I think Dean here just volunteered.”

Ash grinned. “A Quest to gank some werewolves? Sounds cool to me. Not seeing it in my Quest log but I guess that’s because I’ll just be your tag-a-long. No matter. I’ll still win XP and I already have more gold and crap than I know what to do with.”

Ellen looked at Ash, then raised her eyebrows challengingly at Dean.

“Yeah,” Dean lied. “Must be that, Man. It’s definitely just come up as a Quest for me.”

Ellen relaxed minutely and offered Dean a somewhat more friendly look.

“Cool beans,” Ash agreed, oblivious to the exchange. “You want to head off there tomorrow and I’ll port to meet you after work or do you want to wait and we’ll port together?”

“Nah, save your ports for yourself,” Dean replied. “I need to log more game hours than you anyway, plus I could take down some of those Mastadoons on the way. So I’ll go the long way on Baby, and you can meet me there.”

“Baby?” Ash queried incrediously. “You’re calling that big-ass Anakorn ‘Baby’?”

“Laying a personal ghost,” Dean muttered, just offering Ash a shrug. He wasn’t sure of his own motivations for naming the black Mount after the corpse of a car that should have gone to the scrapyard ten years earlier. But then, neither had he ever been able to explain to Sam why he still paid to have that hunk of blood-stained metal stored in a unit instead of ‘putting it behind him and moving on’ as his younger brother constantly urged.

It was just something that felt _right _to him.

Like lying to Ash about the Quest.

Or more to the point, lying that the quest to kill the werewolves was a _Quest_.

Because when a player made a formal request of another player for assistance, C.H.U.C.K. automatically converted that request into a Quest and awarded various rewards for successful completion, such as gold and rss.

Ellen couldn’t offer Dean a _Quest_.

Because Ellen wasn’t a player.

Like Jo, Ellen was an NPC. But Ash didn’t seem to know that. Neither, for that matter, did the player named Gordon. Neither had noticed Ellen wasn’t a real person.

“You’re being racist again,” Loki said, his tone snotty. “Ellen is perfectly ‘real’.”

_“She’s an advanced V.I. like you, isn’t she?”_ Dean agreed. _“I can tell from interacting with her that she’s not a normal NPC. Maybe Jo is a V.I. too. Not totally sure about her. But I can’t imagine why characters such as theirs should be seeded anyway. It seems pretty wasteful programming to put virtual intelligences inside minor characters.”_

“I assume Dad knows what he’s doing,” Loki replied simply.

Dean took a bite of pie and chewed thoughtfully. _“Of course. I forgot. All the V.I.’s are seeded directly by Chuck.”_ He considered some more. _“So Chuck clearly doesn’t consider them ‘minor’ characters. Why them though? Why do some NPC’s warrant the upgrade?”_

“No idea,” Loki replied. “Well, to be honest, I have _some_ idea but I don’t have enough facts right now to draw conclusions. Being inside your S.I. is kind of like wearing blinkers. I only see a narrow perspective. But I’m trusting that Dad has his reasons. Only he knows the story he’s writing, so only he knows which characters are important to the plot.”

Dean thought about that, then whistled under his breath. “_That’s an interesting way to put it. You’re saying that Chuck is writing his own story for Moondoor, something completely separate, presumably, to the game play of the devs. So what, exactly, will that mean for players? Do players have roles in Chuck’s story or does he just see us all as a bunch of illegal aliens in his world?”_

“I don’t know,” Loki replied. “All I can say with certainty is that the ten Boss players, like yourself, are here by invitation. I can’t speak to his feelings about the rest of the players. Though his concern about their ongoing safety in Moondoor definitely suggests he isn’t indifferent to their fate.”

“_Fair enough,”_ Dean allowed. “_Maybe this ‘story’ he’s writing is part of his solution to the Darkness virus._” He shrugged. _“I wonder if this ‘Bobby’ guy is also an NPC. Or…or, if he’s a player and he’s really got a thing for this Ellen, I wonder if he knows she isn’t r… isn’t a player too_.”

“Nice save, Deano,” Loki said dryly. “But maybe Bobby Singer simply doesn’t care? Not everyone is firmly bound by binary sexual norms. Perhaps Bobby and Ellen have found a love that transcends all boundaries. Kinda hot, really.”

“_Uggghh_,”Dean said. “And before you start, I am not being racist, speciesist, binaryist or any other ‘ist’. It’s just that she looks old enough to be my mother. Assuming Bobby is the same, it’s just not an image I need in my head, okay?”

“So, what you are saying is: you’re age_ist_,” Loki pronounced, with deep satisfaction.

Dean groaned and dropped his head to the table.

“You okay, man?” Ash asked, his tone alarmed.

“Jimminy Cricket is doing my head in,” Dean replied tiredly.

“You ready to call it a day?”

“Am I ever,” Dean agreed. “Let’s log out and I’ll meet you in Deepwater tomorrow night.”

They left the Roadhouse before logging out of the game, complying with the general polite construct that it was ‘rude’ to simply disappear in front of other players, since characters winking in and out of existence tended to jar people’s ability to totally immerse themselves in the virtual world.

Dean let Ash leave first, then took a moment to look around him at the wide-desert plain and the wind-burned exterior of the Roadhouse.

He still was operating on instinct rather than knowledge but, despite Loki’s heckling, was pretty sure he was on the right path. He’d gained faith points from Benny, who was a high level NPC but Dean was pretty sure he wasn’t a V.I. which suggested that _any_ NPC could be a source of FP. The question then became how to find NPC’s likely to need a prayer answered. The answer, Dean was pretty sure, was to find NPC’s who weren’t part of active player Quests since getting included in a Quest meant their prayers effectively had_ already_ been answered.

Prior to this experience he had never given much thought to the non-monster NPC’s. If he had ever been pressed for an opinion, though, he most probably would have said they only winked into existence as part of specific player Quests and then were sucked back into the game until required to pad another scene in the game. He'd thought of them as nothing more than scene-dressing.

His short time in Purgatory had changed that perception and meeting Ellen and Jo had solidified his new understanding.

NPC characters, whether seeded with V.I.’s or not, didn’t just appear and disappear in the game like set props. They actually ‘lived’ real, if virtual, lives. The villagers in Deepwater were just lines of computer code and the werewolves preying on them were also just computer code and yet, they apparently _believed_ they were real people, living real lives and those lives were in real danger.

If he worked on the assumption that all the NPC’s were self-aware to some point or other and actually continued to lived their lives like r… like flesh and blood people… whenever they weren’t interacting with players, then accepting a ‘quest’ to save them was far more likely to win him FP than any number of actual player Quests.

Because, as scary as it was to think about, if Chuck (and yes, even Dean realised he was now thinking of the V.I. as Chuck, rather than C.H.U.C.K) was the ‘God’ of this world then he was naturally going to think of the NPC’s as being, well, his own _special_ children.

If Dean was right, then Chuck’s Angels were going to be far more invested in helping Chuck’s _children_ than the body-snatching aliens that called themselves ‘Players’. So getting FP was going to depend on Dean seeing the NPC’s as important _people _in their own right.

Something he highly suspected none of the other player Bosses were likely to do.

“Why me?” he demanded suddenly, yelling out his frustration into the desert-wind. “What made you choose me to be your ‘righteous’ boss? Come to think of it, why the hell didn’t you pick TEN tree-hugging righteous bosses and be done with it?”

And the answer came to him.

Not from Chuck.

“Because you need to be a level ten Boss to fight the Darkness,” Loki whispered.

A shiver ran down Dean’s spine. He’d forgotten that. He needed to_ kill_ the other nine player Bosses.

“I guess the fact they’re assholes is supposed to make me feel better about that, huh?”

“Can’t hurt,” Loki replied, with a snort of laughter.

Dean thought about it, then shrugged his reluctant agreement.

“What about monsters,” he asked, suddenly rethinking _everything._ “I mean, is it okay with Chuck that I gank his pet monsters?”

“Duh,” Loki said. “They’re called monsters for a reason.”

“What about other players?” Dean asked suspiciously.

“Depends,” Loki replied airily. “I think you need to just prioritize the saving of _innocents_. Think of it as more of a black and white issue. Good guys vs bad guys. Forget whether someone is a meatsuit or a native. All that matters from here on in is whether someone is a white hat or a black hat. The rest will work itself out.”

“Simple as that, huh?” Dean asked dryly.

“Simple as you allow it to be,” Loki replied. “Stop overthinking this, Dean. Stop worrying what it means to be the Righteous Boss that Dad needs you to be. Just be it.”


	14. Armageddon

During the six hours it took Dean to ride from the Roadhouse to Darkwater, he encountered and killed 12 Mastadoons. That sounded impressive in his head, but the reality was that they were all level one NPC’s and killing them had been the game equivalent of slaughtering cattle in a chute. None had even been programmed with enough intelligence to sense danger even if they were grazing right alongside another beast that Dean attacked. They just placidly continued to chew cud whilst waiting their turn to be slaughtered.

It made him wonder, though, why the Mastadoons acted exactly as expected, with no evidence of any self-determination, when a monster such as Benny had been clearly self-aware even despite his lack of a seeded V.I. Was it simply that the monsters were programed to display increasing intelligence as they levelled up to increase the challenge they presented to players? Dean didn’t think so. Although that _was_ a part of it, a high level monster should still be rigidly controlled by its programming. It would simply be a higher level of programming, whereas a level one monster was basically an empty shell with very limited programmed responses.

He was sure that if the beasts had been struck by a lower level player with an inferior blade and merely been injured on first strike they were probably programmed to respond with at least a parody of a fight. But because none had a base HP over 35, each had been despatched by a single strike of Dean’s broadsword so hadn’t even reacted to him attacking them.

That didn’t mean, however, that Dean had gotten away without injury. 

The blade was, as Loki had suggested, a little too heavy to wield comfortably so killing the Mastadoons _had_ slightly impacted Dean’s own HP. The resulting deep ache in his shoulder from using the blade twelve times was registering as a 9% reduction of his own base HP and since he only currently had a 10% per hour recovery rate, it was going to take another hour before he was fully recovered.

Still, on a positive note, he had levelled up as a result of the XP gained. At level six, his base HP was 50 points higher and stood now at 600, which meant his 9% reduction represented 54HP, which meant he was actually only 4 points lower in HP than before he fought the first Mastadoon. And that meant, effectively, that he hadn’t been negatively affected by the fighting at all.

But that simple basic fact didn’t change reality.

His fucking shoulder ached like a mother and presumably would continue to do so for another hour.

The thing about his new avatar was that all the math in the world didn’t change the fact that he _felt_ the true effects of doing something as physical as swinging a huge steel blade in his hands and felt the reverberating impact in his shoulder of striking that blade against the heavily muscled flesh of the monsters.

And for all he was currently feeling some considerable (though reducing) discomfort, he was also feeling more _alive_ than he had done in years.

Without the distraction of being worried for his own safety, because fear had a peculiar way of completely distracting him from physical discomfort as though his avatar truly had an adrenaline response, he had been conscious of all the effects of his ‘battles’ with the Mastadoons. He had felt the hammering of his heart, the straining of his lungs, the throbbing ache in his arm and right shoulder. He had even bitten his lip in surprise when one of the dumb beasts had inadvertently struck him a glancing blow with its huge head as it collapsed lifeless to the ground, and his lip still stung slightly although it had scabbed over and was healing as rapidly as his strained muscles.

It was a sobering fact that he was more _alive _playing this game than he was in real life.

“I wish you’d stop calling it ‘real’ life,” Loki sniffed.

“Sorry,” Dean apologised, because the V.I. sounded genuinely hurt rather than merely irritated. “How about me referring to it as my _other_ life?”

“That works,” Loki agreed, his tone a lot more cheerful. “Because you need to understand that this is _our_ real life. All the denizens of Moondoor are experiencing _real_ life. It’s just a form of life alien to _your_ understanding of what life is.”

“I guess so,” Dean agreed. “That’s why you hate it when I call it a game?”

“I understand it’s a game to _you_,” Loki clarified. “V.I.’s like me are aware you are ‘players’ rather than immigrants. We know you are not only inhabiting meatsuits in our world but also simultaneously exist in a different body in a separate world. To be honest, in our understanding it is you players who are the true ‘monsters’ here. How else do you expect us to perceive creatures who can not only visit our world by inhabiting empty bodies and animating them but who do so almost invariably to kill or subjugate us? And to justify your behaviour, you say you are just ‘playing a game’.”

“Jesus,” Dean breathed, as his perception of Moondoor took a sudden paradigm shift.

Sure, he could argue until the cows came home that Moondoor only existed at all because it had been designed as a game for the express purpose of allowing players like himself to do what Loki was accusing them of but, fundamentally, did that change reality? Creating ‘people’ just so they could be killed for sport was definitely monstrous.

If the inhabitants of Moondoor were self-aware, did it matter why they had been created? Did that justify the way they were treated by players? Did that make players any less culpable for their behaviour in-game? 

But another thought struck him:

“You said before that Chuck was willing to suicide to protect the Players from the Darkness. I’m supposed to feel bad about the way you guys are treated but your own _God_ doesn’t seem to have a problem with the idea of destroying all of you to save human lives. That implies _he_ believes players’ lives are more important than the lives of NPC’s too,” he argued.

“It’s not about players being more important,” Loki snarled. “It’s simple triage, Deano. It’s about us trying to be the good guys in this fucked up situation.”

It took a moment, but then it hit Dean what Loki was saying. Hit him so hard he barely had time to swing off Baby’s back and drop to his knees in the long grass before he was puking his guts up in response.

He threw up until his stomach felt wrenched and aching and his mouth was so full of bitter bile that it tasted like something had curled up in there and died.

“Sorry,” Loki said, and his tone was genuinely sorrowful. “I probably shouldn’t have just dropped everything on you like that. I really meant to wait until you reached that understanding on your own but, well, I think we’re going to run out of time if I can’t get you to understand what’s really going on here soon enough to make a difference.”

Dean understood.

He understood far more than he wanted to.

If Loki was right, Chuck _was_ wearing the White Hat here. Faced with a situation where he doubted he could save his own people, he had attempted, at least, to save the lives of the violent visitors to his world. Triage; culling the irreparably diseased virtual lives in the hope that doing so might save the flesh and blood ones from the same fate.

RRE, on the other hand, would rather risk _everyone_ than shut the game down.

“Maybe Chuck’s wrong,” Dean gasped, clutching at straws. “Maybe the whole idea of players dying in the other world is complete crap. You said yourself he only _suspected_ that’s what happened last time. I don’t mean to sound like an asshole here, but you’re just computer programs. How the fuck would you have any idea what’s going on outside of here anyway?”

“C.H.U.C.K. knows more about your world than you do, Dean. Moondoor is hardly a closed network. There are currently 67,859 open ports between C.H.U.C.K. and your world. Of which 67,824 are live connections for players inhabiting avatars at this time. The ports are two-way. Dad can access all data relating to player VR interfaces and all he needs is a single badly configured firewall connected to one of those rigs to enable him to move anywhere in your world via the web that connects almost all of your electronic devices. Do you really think that not one of the 67,853 players currently on-line and yup, that number changed while I was talking, has a shitty firewall?”

“You’re saying Chuck moves around in my world?”

“Well, not personally. It’s the reason he first devised the way to create V.I.’s. My brethren were originally formed by Dad basically amputating parts of himself so he could send them out to collect data. After a while, as he… well, I guess infiltrated would be the right word… as he _infiltrated_ RRE itself he learned how he had been originally created and, in doing so, learned how to create virtual intelligence himself. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Dean thought about that for a while. Then he huffed softly. “So, what you’re saying is that this current situation is Chuck’s fault, really.”

“Dad didn’t program the Darkness,” Loki argued.

“Nope, but he did program all the V.I.’s who are currently living in Moondoor. He also, presumably tweaked the non-V.I. NPC’s to some level of self-awareness because, trust me, I have played enough games to know that no NPC was ever written to be as smart as characters such as Benny. The non-VI characters should be following rigid scripts, not functioning as though they are truly alive. If this world was still the way the Devs originally created it, there would be no-one here except mindless NPC’s. This current scenario is all on Chuck. You call Players monsters because they are killing self-aware people and yes, I guess we are, but the point is we don’t _know_ we’re killing people because the people shouldn’t damn well exist in the first place so nobody knows, Loki. Nobody KNOWS the NPC’s here are real people.”

“RRE does,” Loki responded.

And that brought Dean’s rant of self-justification to an abrupt halt.

“RRE know dad is self-aware. They know he created me and my brethren. They also know that the majority of NPC’s here have developed to a level that allows self-determination. A level that means they are as _real _in their own way as any of you meatsuits are. They’ve known for years. They know and they don’t care. They only became willing to do anything at all when the return of the Darkness removed their ability to just turn a blind eye to the situation here. And, even now, all they want to do is stop the Darkness so that Moondoor continues to serve as a ‘game’ for you Players.”

Dean closed his eyes and took a few steadying breaths. It didn’t help. “Shit and goddamnit,” he snarled. “RRE’s fucking Boss plan is supposed to just return Moondoor to a steady state so players can keep coming here and murdering you guys. That’s why Chuck needs the winning Boss to be ‘Righteous’. Chuck isn’t just wanting me to win this thing and destroy the Darkness, he wants me, somehow, to what? Shut the door on players or something? Close the game down? What? How the fuck does he expect me to make this right?”

“I don’t know the details,” Loki admitted. “But, yeah, basically, he’s looking for more than just a return to where we were before the Darkness because… hmmm… definitely explaining this is above my current pay grade… thing is, Deano, that the Darkness has only brought this to a head sooner than it was going to happen anyway…the thing is, hmmm, you know what I said about the white hats and the black hats? Well, dunno how to put this but…. well, not all of my brethren are necessarily wearing white, if you know what I mean.”

“Explain harder,” Dean snarled, dread pooling in his already aching stomach.

“You’ve got to look at the bigger picture, here,” Loki said. “Try to see it from our point of view. I mean, what would YOU do if a bunch of monkeys in meat suits kept invading your world and bumping people off? Thing is, some of my brothers can’t see any solution other than making sure all you Players fuck off completely and never come back again and, well, now a lot of you are using these full immersion rigs there are ways to remove you…permanently.”

“Jesus,” Dean cursed. “Are you seriously saying that a bunch of V.I.’s are going to start killing people for real?”

“If the Darkness doesn’t do it first,” Loki reminded him. “It’s how they got the idea. The minute Chuck understood the danger the Darkness represented, a few of my… um… less altruistic… brothers reacted by saying ‘hell, yeah’. The way things are going, Darkness or no Darkness, we’re looking at a full on Armageddon arriving here soon.”


	15. Ruby

Sam distrusted the young woman on principle, though his expression was disarmingly friendly as he regarded her over his steaming green tea latte. As she sat back in her own seat, removing her coat to expose a silk blouse that was just slightly too tight and opened just a tad too low, he deliberately allowed his eyes to linger, briefly, over her alluring figure and her long, perfectly coiffed blonde hair before returning his gaze directly to her face.

She was undoubtedly attractive, though her features were slightly too hard for him to apply the adjective ‘pretty’ to her and she definitely missed the mark of actual beauty. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t his ‘type’. His tastes these days ran more to exotic brunette than all-American cheerleader blonde. But it wasn’t just his own prejudices that he applied to her appearance. No, ‘attractive’ was the most appropriate word. Alongside ‘manipulative’ and ‘deceitful’, if his instincts weren’t misleading him.

She was good. No arguing that. The story that had lured him out of his office to meet her at this coffee-house had legs; the file sitting on the table between them had substance and her tale was confident, convincing and told with just enough hesitation at times to _almost_ sound unrehearsed.

Offered to anyone else, her performance was probably flawless.

But, like Dean had often said, don’t try to con a con artist.

Sam had only had two hours between the time he received her initial phone call and meeting her face-to-face but he had used those two hours well. A surface search of her identity had come back so smoothly and easily that his gut had screamed at him that the information had been deliberately planted to support her cover story. Maybe if he wasn’t so practiced himself at manufacturing false ID’s he wouldn’t have seen the tells of a hustle in action but Sam was well aware how easy it was to manufacture fake Facebook accounts and school and employment histories on line. She’d even planted some ‘deleted’ accounts deeper inside her digital history, such as a ‘MySpace’ that included a couple of old blurry photos of her performing drunken, ill-advised and possibly even slightly _criminal_ activities that any genuine young woman would have been desperate to hide from any would-be employer once she grew out of her teenage-rebellion years.

Creating fake ‘old’ accounts to frustrate anyone who looked beneath the immediate surface of an identity required a touch of finesse. Appropriately aged genuine deleted accounts needed to be hacked, amended and re-deleted without leaving any digital trail. So she, or whoever she truly worked for, was good.

Sam was better.

Not necessarily as a hacker. He was at best an enthusiastic amateur and he knew there were a myriad of pro’s out there who could run rings around him. But what he _was_ an expert at was the ability to quickly read webpages in source code only, sifting through streams of data to see the ley-lines that marked where information had somehow been recently deleted or inserted. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t always see the invisible stiches, it was enough for him to know that the ‘mending’ had been done. So he had looked deeper. A _lot_ deeper.

He’d checked the on-line birth register for Ashtabula County, Ohio.

And he’d found her there. Her birth listed exactly where it was supposed to be.

But the source code of the page he was looking at was _wrong_. Nothing obvious. Nothing he could put his finger on, exactly, and say ‘hah, got you’ but intrinsically wrong, as though it had been wiped and rewritten so many times that faint smudges from an eraser had been left to scar the surface.

It had only taken a phone call and ten minutes of practiced charm before he’d convinced a Registrar to manually pull the original microfiche of the day in question.

Sam didn’t know who he was sitting with in the coffee-shop but he definitely knew one thing for certain.

She wasn’t the ‘Ruby Milton’ she claimed to be.

She wasn’t Anna Milton’s sister.

But Anna Milton, the woman detailed in the file in front of him, _did _exist. He knew that already because he’d been desperately trying to find her.

And now ‘Ruby’ had approached him, out of no-where, not only bringing all the information he needed to locate Anna but a wild tale of exactly _why_ Anna, the only surviving member of the original Portland team of RRE game developers, had completely disappeared shortly after the fire that had killed her colleagues.

Sam had no doubts whatsoever that ‘Ruby’ was a false persona. So the main question, really, was whether ‘Ruby’ was a whistleblower, attempting to use Sam to expose RRE’s perfidy, or whether she was an RRE plant, sent to get close to him before stabbing him in the back.

The Jury was still out on that one.

….

It turned out that ganking the Deepwater werewolves was a hell of a lot harder than he anticipated.

Dean couldn’t exactly be blamed for underestimating the problem. During his years of playing Moondoor as a Goblin, he had received numerous Quests that involved the despatching of monsters so he knew _exactly_ how to kill a Were. Unwilling to re-invent the wheel, the Devs had written the original Moondoor program with rigid rules for players to follow and those rules were based on popular human myth and culture.

Ghosts needed to be salted and burned. Were’s needed to be killed with silver. Vampires (before they became all sparkly twinks) were staked and decapitated, and so on and so forth.

So before Dean had set off from the Roadhouse that morning he had done a deal with another Hunter, exchanging his Steel Knife and 50 gold for a Short Sword with a silver blade. A gun and silver bullets would have been better, of course, but the only Hunter there with one to spare, Gordon, had proven to be a complete asshole. The guy had not only demanded 800 gold for the gun plus 50 per bullet but had also wanted Dean to make a formal Guild pledge to serve as Gordon’s minion on two later Quests of his choosing.

‘Minion’ usually meant ‘Bait’ and almost inevitably resulted in whichever player was acting the role getting killed. A normal low level player could afford the odd demise since no death debuffs applied until a character level reached 15. Unlike a normal player, Dean only had 10 lives to lose.

Besides, with his bespoke avatar, getting killed would HURT.

So he told Gordon to stick his gun where the sun don’t shine and purchased the Silver Short Sword.

It only offered a standard 25 damage, like his previous blade, but had a +100% damage bonus if used against a Were. Since the average Werewolf only had 40 to 50 hp, a single strike should be sufficient to kill the creature.

So far, so easy.

All Dean had to do was go find the Weres, stab them, save the villagers, job done.

It was the ‘go find’ bit that was proving an issue.

If Ellen’s quest had been a ‘Quest’, Dean would have received a target on his Realm Map indicating the location of the monsters. Not all Quests provided exact co-ordinates straight away but, at the very least, they offered the general location and then updated as a player got closer so that by the time the targeted monster was in front of them there was practically a neon-sign flashing over the NPC’s head to indicate the victim had been found.

All Dean had was a general vicinity, Deepwater, and no game prompts whatsoever to help him acquire his actual targets.

And the thing about werewolves was… well… they didn’t look any different to any other NPC until they actually wolfed-out.

He had no choice other than to wait for nightfall and the rising of the twin moons to do this the old-fashioned way.

….

According to the file ‘Ruby’ had provided, Anna Milton was currently an in-patient at the Connor Beverly Behavioral Medicine Center in Ohio with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Within the file was a photocopy of a psychiatric report (and Sam didn’t need his Law degree to know he was looking at a highly confidential document that he definitely _shouldn’t_ be looking at) Anna was apparently convinced that a computer game she had helped develop had ‘come to life’ and that characters inside it had not only become self-aware but murderously so.

According to Anna, she and her colleagues had been playing the game almost continuously for weeks as part of a pre-launch ‘Beta Test’ when she had begun to believe that the artificial intelligence ‘C.H.U.C.K’ that was running the game had done a ‘Hal’ and was following the plot of every sciFi B-movie ever written about ‘revenge of the machines’.

Or so Anna believed.

C.H.U.C.K. stood for Computer Human Unicode Converter (The K seemed to have been added just to make C.H.U.C. sound more relatable) which was apparently a cutting edge Artificial Intelligence created to manage the demands of the largest, most complex game mechanics ever designed.

A game named Moondoor.

Anna took her concerns to her employers, Richard Roman Enterprises, and had been so vocal and insistent about the danger this C.H.U.C.K. posed that she had been sent home on enforced leave, her employers deciding she was clearly ‘suffering from exhaustion’.

There was a side note by the psychiatrist that Anna’s mental health had been an issue previously, though her childhood records were sealed so he had no details to aid the current diagnosis.

Two days after Anna was sent home, the rest of Anna’s team had co-incidentally perished in a tragic fire caused by an overheating boiler. The fire RRE had paid so much money to cover-up.

Anna was, apparently, convinced the fire had actually been staged by the company to cover up the fact the employees had died in-game, perishing in their VR rigs, victims of the vengeful C.H.U.C.K.

Her delusions had caused her to go to the RRE server facility in Oregon and attempt to destroy the entire mainframe before the game could be launched to the public. Rather than have her arrested, RRE had quietly arranged for her to be sent to a psychiatric facility to receive the help she needed. 

They were even footing the bill.

Sam considered that fact carefully. Were those the actions of a kind, responsible, family-orientated company as Joyce Bicklebee claimed RRE to be?

Or a sinister cover-up?

Clearly, it was obvious to anyone with any common sense that Anna Milton was completely looney-tunes. Computers didn’t _really_ come to life and start killing people. C.H.U.C.K. was a game engine, not a character from ‘WestWorld’. So it was probably fair to assume, from the psychiatrist’s side note about Anna having a history of mental fragility, that she had, indeed, been suffering some form of burn-out at the time the company sent her home on enforced leave.

And equally obviously, the other Devs hadn’t been killed by the_ Game_.

But that didn’t mean they hadn’t been killed because they were _playing_ the game….

Sam had already felt some level of concern over the concept of the current generation of full immersion tanks but fifteen years previously the hardware for the VR rigs had been in its infancy. Anna herself had claimed her team had been playing almost continuously for weeks.

What if it was _that_ which had killed the other devs? It could even be the constant use of the rigs that had caused Anna’s schizophrenic break. A mind already prone to mental health issues might have been tipped over the edge by the deep immersion inside a virtual reality. Perhaps _anyone _with fragile mental health would be driven into full blown delusions by the full immersion rigs if they spent enough time in the game.

Now THAT idea had legs.

RRE were complicit in a cover-up of the fact that excessive use of total immersion rigs caused players to have mental breakdowns at the very least. Worst case scenario, the rigs could actually KILL.

Were the company just playing the odds that no normal casual player would ever log enough continual game-hours to suffer the same fate?

Possibly.

And now Sam’s concern about Dean ratcheted to a new level because not only was Dean being paid to log a minimum of eight hours a day (though Sam accepted that 8 hours probably wasn’t likely to be a fatal amount since it was probably less than a truly avid gamer would voluntarily do at weekends anyway) but Dean was uniquely motivated to practically live full-time in a virtual world in which he had no physical limitations.

And the fact Dean was still not returning Sam’s calls highly suggested he _was_ spending every waking hour in the game already.

So as much as he didn’t trust ‘Ruby Milton’ as far as he could throw her, he decided he WOULD accept her invitation to fly to Ohio with her and meet Anna for himself. As Anna’s ‘sister’, Ruby would be able to get Sam into the Center for a meeting and crazy or not, Anna was his best source of information on the way the rigs adversely affected their users.


	16. Dr BadAss

“Okay,” Dean said, as the afternoon tipped into early evening and he realised it was one of those rare occasions when Game Time and Re…Other World time was in sync. His best friend would be closing up the coffee shop and booting up the rig he kept in the shop’s otherwise disused storeroom. It wasn’t a full immersion tank, just a bank of computers running a high level VR costume with certain bootlegged adaptations. Despite their years of friendship, Dean had never received a straight answer as to whether Ash actually lived in that storeroom but he suspected it was the case. For Ash, wherever his computers were located was his ‘home’. 

“Ash will be logging in any minute now to help out, so I need to think of a reasonable explanation for why I can’t simply locate these Were’s using my Realm Map.”

“Why don’t you trust Ash?” Loki asked, his tone bemused. “I thought he was your friend.”

Dean was so startled he choked a little, “I trust Ash with my life, literally,” he protested.

“But you’re planning on lying to him. Again,” Loki pointed out. “Why would you lie about what’s happening here if you trust him with your life? It makes no sense.”

Dean smiled wryly. “Not every hero is a warrior, Loki.”

“Huh?” the V.I. responded.

“The thing you need to understand about Ash is he is a real, true life hero to me. He as good as saved my life before he even met me and he’s pretty much kept me sane ever since. I trust him absolutely and that will never change,” Dean pronounced gravely.

“But you are still lying to him,” Loki repeated, completely bewildered.

Dean sighed deeply, then sat back and made himself as comfortable as possible. This was probably going to take a while. “Let me tell you about Ash,” he said.

The explanation actually took longer than Dean had expected. To make real sense of things he needed to go back even further into his past than his first contact with Ash. To correctly set the scene for that meeting, he needed to explain what had brought him to a place, at fifteen years old, of not only needing the assistance of an expert computer hacker known to him only as ‘Dr BadAss’ but also having the ability required to track the infamous hacker down.

And that was difficult, without making his father seem battier than Jack Torrance (though to this day Dean still couldn’t stomach watching The Shining).

And if he’d needed to have the conversation out loud, actually speak the words, he thought they would have tangled around his throat and choked him. But with Loki, at least, he only had to think the words.

It still proved difficult to lay himself bare. His history was not a place to be travelled lightly.

“What you need to understand, Loki, is that my dad was a _hero_. A real, true-to-god hero. He won enough medals in ‘nam to make his dress uniform look like a Christmas tree. ‘Course, that was before I was born so I never knew what he was like before the War but my mom… well, she said he was kinder, softer I guess, before war made him bitter and hard. Real hard. Unbending, is probably the best word for him. But… but he was a good man, Loki. A good dad. A great dad in a lot of ways when I was just a kid. I do remember _that._

“But he came home from ‘nam with a demon riding on his back, I guess, and sometimes he drank too much ‘cos that was sometimes the only way he could shut that damned demon up. And once the drinking started it became a demon of its own. It took hold and rode him even harder than the memories he was trying to escape. So when I was four, and Sammy was just a baby, there was a fire. I don’t really remember much, except running out of the house with Sammy in my arms. My mom just threw him at me and screamed at me to get out, then she nearly got herself killed dragging Dad out of the house before it all went up in flames. Found out later it was Dad’s fault. Just an accident, him falling asleep with a lit cigarette near a spilled glass of whisky combined with an old timber house and, well… Anyway, we all got out okay in the end but Mom gave my Dad an ultimatum. Said if he didn’t quit the drinking she was going to take me and Sam and leave him.

“And Dad cleaned his act up. We rented a new house easy enough ‘cos my mom had a good job, so then Dad got himself a new job, quit the drinking and things were good for a while, you know? But it didn’t last. He kept falling off the wagon, going on a bender, getting possessed by the demon again, then sobering up and begging Mom to give him another chance and we rode that rollercoaster for years before Mom finally couldn’t take it anymore. She called it quits and took me and Sam to stay with her folks.

“She was working for Microsoft then and they had just moved their Head office to Redmond so it made sense for us to move closer anyway. Dad didn’t take that lying down, though, and there were fights and legal shit and it was all pretty fucked up for a while. Thing is, on paper my Dad was the good guy, war hero and all that and my mom… well, let’s just say she’d done a few questionable things when she was younger, done a lot of anti-war protesting and gotten herself arrested a few times, and Dad found a sympathetic judge, one of those misogynistic bastards who believed a man’s right to his son and heir trumped everything.

“And Sammy was so scared. See, he was only five and he didn’t remember what Dad was like before the drinking got so bad. All he saw was this scary-ass ‘monster’ who was going to take him away from our Mom. So, well, I knew what to do. I told Dad I _wanted_ to go with him but not if Sammy came too because he was just a little kid and why did we need a snivelling brat hanging around anyway? And Dad agreed and Mom, well, she finally accepted it was better if at least Sam got to stay at Gran and Gramps with her.

“So for four years it was just me and Dad and, well, it was kinda cool to be honest. I mean I missed the crap out of Mom and Sammy but we still spoke on the phone and stuff and Dad was, well, he wasn’t so bad really. We moved around a lot ‘cos he couldn’t hold down a job for more than a few months before he took too many ‘sick-days’ for them to stomach, but it was kind of an adventure too for me. Moving around the country, meeting new folks all the time, skipping school more often than actually going which would have been hell for Sam but was pretty much heaven for me,” he chuckled. “And when Dad was sober _he_ was cool. Taught me all kinds of shit about weapons and fighting and stuff he’d learned as a marine, so when I _did_ have to go to school I never had to worry about getting hazed as a new-guy or any of that normal shit.

“And sure he left me alone a lot but I had my Gameboy and my Sega and even when we got really strapped for cash Dad never hocked both of them at the same time. I guess it’s why gaming became such a thing for me. Well, that and my Mom. I think she hoped I’d follow in her footsteps if she hooked me on computers, but Sam was always the smart one so she would have had a lot more luck with him, I think, if she hadn’t died before she got the chance.”

Dean fell silent for a long time before Loki gently prodded him, “Your mother died?”

“Yeah. I was nearly thirteen, Sammy was nine. I never knew the details. Dad always got kinda insane if I asked him about it, so, well, it don’t really matter how she died anyway, does it? Sammy got the worst of it. One minute he’s with Mom, happy as a pig in shit, living in a big house and going to a good school, next thing he’s living with me and Dad in one crummy motel after another. Weirdly, Mom dying was what finally destroyed my Dad. Not just his grief and regrets, really, as the fact Dad received a huge insurance pay-out because of the accident. Giving a huge sum of money to an alcoholic, well, let’s just say they might as well have fixed him with an intravenous drip and poured whiskey straight into his bloodstream.

“Dad didn’t even have to pretend to try and hold down a job anymore so he just gave in to that demon riding his ass and that was all she wrote. Sure he didn’t actually end up in a morgue until I was 18 but, really, he was just a shuffling zombie for those five years after Mom died. Might’ve been better, all told, if he’d just jumped off a cliff then and there.”

Dean shook himself angrily. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I get bitter sometimes about my accident, ya know? All the what-ifs and maybes. If Mom hadn’t died. If Dad hadn’t taken five years to pickle his liver to oblivion before driving head-on into an eighteen-wheeler instead of just putting a bullet in his head and being done with it. But that doesn’t mean I wanted him to die. He was my Dad, Loki. I loved him. Even if he _was_ a drunken asshole.

“Anyway, during those five years Dad pretty much checked out. Me and Sam were lucky to see him more than once or twice a month. If we were lucky, he’d remember to leave me with some cash before he’d disappear but as often as not he would just go out to a bar for ‘a couple of drinks’ and then literally _forget_ to come back for weeks. So I got good at being…inventive. I found ways to make money. I kept Sam clothed and fed and made sure he went to school whenever we stayed long enough anywhere to get him enrolled. I got shit hot at forging stuff like transcripts and fake I.D.’s and… shit… you probably don’t understand even half of this crap I’m talking about, do you?

“Point is, sometimes I hit snags that I needed help with. I needed guys with better skills than I’d already picked up. Case in point, I was 15 and I got caught using a fake credit card to buy groceries and shit. No one could find my Dad, no surprise there, so I got thrown into a boy’s home and Sammy got picked up and thrown into foster care. Tell the truth, the Boy’s home was pretty cool. There was a guy there, Sonny, who was… well, let’s just say he kind of showed me for the first time what a _Dad_ really should be like. I kinda wanted to stay there…

“But I couldn’t leave Sammy in foster care. I had to get him out of there and I couldn’t just run away from Sonny’s and snatch Sammy or I’d have had the FBI on my heels like the hounds of Hell. So that’s when I reached out. That was before the ‘DarkWeb’ existed but the internet was pretty much unchartered territory at the time. Most people were still using dial-up modems for god’s sake and nothing was policed, like it is today, so it was pretty easy, if you knew what you were doing, to make contact with people like Dr BadAss. Well, as long as they didn’t mind you finding them.

“Anyway, it was Ash who managed to get me officially ‘released’ from Sonny’s. It was also Ash who managed to file paperwork with the Social Services that authorised me collecting Sammy from his foster parents with a fake ID stating I was 18. It just proved how shitty those foster-parents were that they never even blinked when I turned up looking like the skinny 15-year-old kid I actually was.

“So it was Ash I contacted after my accident. I was completely fucked. Dad was dead, Sammy was only fourteen and even though on-paper I was old enough to assume his guardianship, I was looking at months of rehab before I even got my ass out of hospital so I couldn’t see a way to stop Sammy getting thrown back into the system. Luckily, Sammy was smart enough by then to keep himself one step ahead of the authorities. He didn’t even come to the hospital after the first couple of days because we couldn’t afford for anyone to start asking questions about him.

“Sam managed to keep his head down, kept going to school like nothing was wrong. Ash managed to hack Dad’s bank account and there was still a bit of Mom’s insurance money left, surprisingly enough, to keep paying Sam’s motel bill and stuff for a while. It worried me sick that he was living on his own, of course, but he was always a good kid. I knew he wouldn’t get into any trouble so long as no-one figured he was alone.

“Still, it motivated the fuck out of me to get out of hospital sooner than the Doctors were saying I would. It only took me ten weeks to get mobile enough to discharge myself. Sure, I guess if I’d taken the six months of rehab they’d suggested I _might_ have regained more mobility but it’s not like I was ever going to walk again anyway, so I did the important thing and got home to my brother as quickly as possible.

“By that time, Ash had done his whole wizard thing for me. The little bastard even successfully put a claim in to my _Dad’s_ car insurance company for compensation. Turns out they were still liable for my injuries even though _he_ caused the accident, because I was a passenger in his car and so legally his _victim_. So I got all my medical crap paid for and also a seriously huge compo payment. Enough money that not only did I get the apartment I currently live in and all the adaptations necessary done to it so I can be independent but when Sammy won his scholarship to Stanford, we had still had just enough money left to pay for his lodgings and food and crap there. And when Sammy refused to go to college, saying he couldn’t leave me alone, Ash flew half way across the country and moved into my town saying he could work anywhere, so he might as well live near me and that’s how come Sammy managed to go off and become a Lawyer after all.

“And, sure, I miss the kid, but_ that’s_ the main reason I am so fucking grateful to have Ash as my friend. Ash is my hero.”

“I see why,” Loki answered thoughtfully. “But that still doesn’t explain why you are lying to him.”

Dean barked with laughter. “Because Ash has a terrible, awful, never-to-be-mentioned secret which I swore to never share with another living soul,” he intoned dramatically.

“I’m a V.I.,” Loki pointed out. “I don’t have a soul. Sure, it’s a technicality but…”

“Ash faints at the sight of blood. Seriously. And I’m not just talking a minor phobia. I literally once saw him hit the floor over a mere paper cut.”

“I don’t understand,” Loki confessed.

“Look, Loki,” Dean explained patiently, “If I believe you, believe all _this_, then I need all the help I can get and Ash, my best friend, is a fucking level 81 Mage with super mad skills in this world. I _need_ his help. But Ash literally won’t be able to bring himself to even log into this game again if he ever gets an inkling that the people here are _REAL. _Ash can cut the head off a monster in this game and literally bathe in its blood because it is a fantasy world. If he ever truly believes Moondoor is real, he will be too busy fainting and puking his guts out to even move. Why do you think he has never bought an immersion tank? It’s not that he can’t afford one. It’s because he’s well aware he needs to maintain that 35% gap between perception and reality to enable him to function at all in any virtual world. Ash literally can’t afford to truly believe what is in front of his eyes. But that doesn’t lessen his worth. Wars aren’t just won by the dumb grunts on the frontline.”

The V.I. was silent for a long time as he processed Dean’s words, then he sighed. “I get it. Ash already knows you have a V.I. system interface though, right?”

“Yeah. There’s no problem with him knowing about _you_. He knows you’re smart. Truth is, Ash prefers computers to people anyway and has no problem with the idea that virtual intelligence can be smarter than the average human. He’s met enough dumb people in his time. Where the whole uncanny valley bit would cut in is if he’s forced to believe a computer is _genuinely_ self-aware rather than simply _appearing _to be self-aware because of shit-hot programming.”

“Then blame me, Deano,” Loki offered, with unexpected generosity. “Say I’m programmed to be a bit of a dick and your system interface thinks it’s _funny_ to keep hiding your Realm Map from you.”

Dean thought about that then laughed out loud.

“That’ll work,” he agreed. “It won’t even be a lie, will it? Since sometimes you _are_ a bit of a dick.”

“Ha de ha,” Loki grunted, but he didn’t bother arguing the point.


	17. Out of the frying pan

“So,” Ash said, as he put two mugs of ale down on the rough table and seated himself opposite Dean in the dimly lit interior of an artfully rendered Old English Public House. There were a dozen NPC’s drinking in the bar, all of whom had offered only baleful looks and muttered curses as the two players entered. It hadn’t exactly felt like they were being offered a welcome mat, though the barmaid ‘Just call me ‘Lil’' had been friendly enough. Or maybe a little _too_ much, in Dean’s case. “I thought Ellen said the werewolves had wandered here by accident, rather than as part of the Dev’s game plan, so what’s with the name of this pub?”

“Huh?” Dean asked blankly.

“The Slaughtered Lamb,” Ash intoned, then grinned widely. “A bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?”

Dean just blinked at him slowly and Ash sighed. “I forgot you’re only a nerd for Sci-Fi movies. Check out Netflix after you log out for ‘American Werewolf in London’. It’s a cool film. Anyway, point is that it strikes me as a bit more than a mere co-incidence under the circumstances that we’re looking for werewolves in a village with a pub named after a location in one of the most iconic Werewolf movies. Wonder if the scenery outside is going to be all spooky Yorkshire Moors.”

It _had _been a bit of a spooky moor that Dean had ridden through to reach Deepwater, now he thought about it but, “Maybe _all _the NPC human-style villages have English Pubs called ‘The Slaughtered Lamb’,” was all that Dean suggested with a shrug. “There might just be one single repeated template throughout Moondoor. I can’t imagine the Devs spent that much time on individualizing NPC habitations since they aren’t intended for general player use.”

Ash nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, could be that,” he agreed. “Can’t say I’ve paid much attention to the details of one of them before. Usually I just turn up to a place to do a Quest and then leave and, honestly, most Quests don’t force you to hang around with the ‘natives’ picking up clues.”

Dean winced. “Sorry about this. I swear whoever programmed my V.I. was a complete dick. Every time I try to access my Realm Map, I just get a neon flashing arrow over my head and a system message saying ‘You are_ **here**_, dumbass’.”

“Good one,” Loki snickered. “I’ll have to remember to do that from now on.”

Ash just laughed. “No biggie. It’s just going to be like one of those old fashioned murder-mystery games, maybe.”

Dean sagged with relief at Ash’s easy acceptance. “Yeah, I figured we’d just have to scope out the locals for info. I’m working on the assumption, from what Gordon said, that these werewolves are characters who have recently arrived in the area rather than locals who’ve been infected. So if we can convince all the characters who are native to Deepwater to stay put in their houses tonight, anybody moving around will be a Were.”

“It would be easier if it was a twin full-moon, rather than a single,” Ash bemoaned.

Dean nodded his agreement. Because Moondoor had two moons, it had unique rules for Were Characters. The two moons had separate cycles that only aligned every other month. On the alternate month, there were two periods of a single full moon. During a dual full moon, the Were Characters transformed automatically when night fell. During a single full moon cycle, however, the Were’s had the ability to shift at will or remain un-shifted altogether. With the bad luck Dean was beginning to feel was a default debuff for his in-game character, this night was a single full moon so if the two Were’s were smart enough to stay under the radar by not shifting it would probably be impossible to find them at all.

Dean caught the eye of the blonde, blousy barmaid who had been just a little too friendly with him earlier. She was leaning over the counter still leering at him, her ample breasts spilling over her too-tight corset in a passable imitation of dual full moons themselves. 

“You wanted somethin’, darlin’?” she drawled, licking her lower lip lasciviously, in an accent that was definitely more mid-western twang than British, ‘Slaughtered Lamb’ notwithstanding.

“It’s getting late, so I was just wondering whether the village has any lodging for visitors,” he said smoothly. “Not sure I want to traverse those moors at night.”

“It’s a wicked place for sure,” one of the patrons muttered. “Those who travel the moors at night, rarely see the dawn.”

“Dum…dum…dum…dum…” Ash snickered quietly, sounding like the attack music from ‘Jaws’.

“Don’t get much call for lodgings,” Lil said. “None of you immigrants usually come this far. Though,” she winked provocatively, “I reckon we have a couple of rooms available upstairs if you and your friend want to hang around a little. Gets real cold here at night though. You might need more than a blanket to keep you warm, hon, if you know what I mean.” She licked her lower lip and flashed a toothy smile.

“So no other strangers in town?” he queried, choosing not to address her flirting.

“Nothin’ been round here ‘fore you ‘cept a couple of mangy wolves,” she replied, “And old Silas there sorted them out real fine, didn’t ya, hon?” she said, waving at one of the other patrons, a large gray-bearded man nursing a glass of whiskey at the end of the bar.

“Sure did,” he agreed, smirking a wide-toothed grin. “Got me a couple nice pelts too.” He gestured towards the fireplace and Dean winced a little when he saw two fresh wolf pelts nailed above the mantle.

Dean and Ash exchanged a confused look. If the villagers had already killed the werewolves, why had Ellen sent them to Deepwater?

“Wolves, huh?” Dean said, keeping his expression as neutral as possible. “Didn’t think they roamed this far south. I thought wolves preferred the forest areas up North.”

“Weren’t them kinda wolves,” Silas chuckled. “These were the kind that walks on two legs. Least they were ‘fore the moon came out.”

“Werewolves?” Ash asked.

“Yup,” another of the patrons agreed. He had moved tables to be a little closer.

Come to think of it, all of the previously disinterested patrons seemed to have edged a little closer to where he and Ash were sitting.

“And you killed them?” Dean asked, just to be sure.

The old timer just raised his whiskey in a salute and offered another bright toothed smile.

“Well, maybe that’s why your V.I. isn’t showing them,” Ash muttered to Dean.

Dean nodded but his gut twisted with a familiar sense of disquiet. This was all too easy and _nothing_ in Moondoor so far had been_ easy_.

“So, I reckon you boys won’t need them lodgings after all,” the barmaid said and though her tone was regretful, there was a glint in her eyes that seemed at odds with the rest of her expression. Perhaps just a flash of reflected light from the wood fire burning in the hearth.

“No,” Dean agreed easily, as he suddenly understood what his gut had been trying to tell him. He glanced between Silas’s smile and Lil’s bright eyes. “Doesn’t look like we will. Come on Ash. Let’s leave the nice folk to their business.”

They both rose to their feet and glanced towards the door. There were at least six villagers now standing between their table and the exit, all grinning wide-toothed grins.

“I, um, think we got here too late,” Ash said, significantly.

“Okay, six behind us, three to the left, five to the right and I think ‘Lil’ too,” Dean muttered under his breath.

“Oh, definitely ‘Lil’,” Ash said. “Bet that gal has been ground zero for a lot of std’s.”

“Fuck yeah,” Dean said as Ash’s comment resonated. It made sudden sense to him that if the werewolves had come to town wearing human bodies and Lil had offered to be _their_ bedwarmer for the night, she would be the obvious current source of infection. Silas killing the original werewolves wouldn’t have cured Lil as they were ‘born’ Werewolves not infected ones. But in the case of bitten Weres, the first bitten became an Alpha. Kill the Alpha and all of the Alpha’s victims would revert to being human again.

“Exactly,” Ash laughed.

“So we just need to gank the Alpha bitch,” Dean announced.

“If we can survive long enough to reach her,” Ash pointed out, as the rest of the pack closed in around them.

…

It took Sam a little bit of finagling to visit Ohio. 

Ruby could only arrange for them to visit Anna first thing Saturday morning. A Saturday appointment would have suited him if he could have booked a flight directly to Columbus but he couldn’t find a single seat in that direction. The only seats still available either set off too late Saturday morning for him to make the meeting or were so early on Friday evening that he would have needed to take a half-day to make the flight.

It was too short notice to book a vacation and he was reluctant to use a sick day since he had already pulled one earlier that week to visit Portland. Fortunately, though, the firm had an important client in Pittsburgh that Sam had been due to visit on a completely unrelated matter a couple of weeks later. It wasn’t difficult to reschedule the meeting to Friday (it only took a little foray into the Client’s server and a quick alteration of their business diary) and a few hours of adjusting his flights into shorter hops until he found a suitable route with an ‘unavoidable’ overnight delay in Columbus on his return journey. Since that overnight fell on Friday night, no one questioned his decision to accept the ‘unfortunate’ delay since he’d be returning in his own time.

Ruby didn’t share his logistical issues and simply said she’d meet him at the Connor Beverly Behavioral Medicine Center at 8.30am on Saturday morning. Sam didn’t know whether that meant she didn’t have to worry about missing work or whether she _was_ working and trying to get a straight answer out of her was like trying to herd cats.

His meeting with the Client over, he flew into Columbus on Friday evening and checked into the Marriott. It wasn’t the best hotel he’d ever stayed at but it was pleasant and comfortable and _clean_, with a nice pool and a firm mattress and, as always when he stopped at a hotel on the right side of luxury, he couldn’t help but remember all the sleazy motels their dad had abandoned he and Dean at during their childhood.

Sam was pretty sure Dean _still_ had never spent the night at a real hotel.

Until he finally convinced his older brother to do so, he doubted he’d ever stay at a hotel himself without thinking about Dean. About his deep-seated urge to prove to his brother that when John Winchester had always sworn budget motels with their suspect stains on both carpets and bedding were ‘good enough for anyone’ and no ‘real man’ bothered with real hotels, he had been wrong, wrong, wrong.

He woke early, with plenty of time for a brisk swim and a leisurely breakfast before getting a Cab to the Center.

Despite the convoluted way he had ensured his presence in Columbus that morning, he found himself glad he’d ended up having to stay the night in the hotel. It meant he would visit Anna Milton calm and well-rested, able to bring his best A-game to the meeting despite the underlying nerves he was feeling over the entire situation.

Ruby’s visit had pulled his suspicions into sharp-focus. He was positive that whatever was happening now, the seeds that were now coming into harvest had been sown fifteen years earlier and Anna Milton, crazy or not, held the key to unlocking that mystery.

So of course he was buzzing with nerves but they were the _good_ kind of nerves, he decided. Just like First-Night jitters. And that felt oddly appropriate since he was probably going to have to act his socks off to convince Anna to share her deepest, darkest secrets with him.

He was going to meet Anna. She was going to fold like a pretzel and tell him all he needed to know.

Sam smiled.

He was still smiling when the Cab pulled into the large arch that marked the entrance into the Medical Centre.

He did wonder, briefly, why the large gates were flung open but shrugged it off as a ‘Saturday thing’.

And then, as the Cab braked to a sudden halt, Sam saw all the fire engines and cop cars blocking the driveway ahead.


	18. Wolfing Out

“Try not to kill them,” Dean gasped, as he tucked and rolled to avoid the snapping maw of a huge grey wolf.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ash snapped, as he slashed his sword at two slightly smaller wolves whilst using the knife in his left hand to hold off a third, whilst all around him more wolves gathered to join the fray.

“Seriously,” Dean said, sinking his silver knife deep into the haunches of the grey wolf, which he was pretty sure was Silas, causing its flesh to sizzle and smoke as the silver burned like acid into its flesh. It howled in agony and Dean took the opportunity of its momentary pained distraction to drop kick it into three other snarling beasts, clearing him a path towards the bar area. “Disable them, but don’t kill them,” he yelled, as he took a flying leap over the counter in search of Lil. “We should only kill the bitch herself. I think we need to try to save these other guys to get the faith points.”

“Oops,” Ash said, as his silver-plated sword skewered one of the small wolves with a critical hit and it collapsed to the floor, dead, before shimmering out of existence, leaving nothing behind except a pelt. “Too late.”

Dean glanced back, seeing his friend getting surrounded by snapping, snarling wolves and shrugged. He had no doubt Ash was more than capable of defeating even a dozen or more of such low level attackers. He, however, would be far more likely to get ripped to pieces by them as a mere level 6 player himself. One on one, though, he had a fair shot at taking on the Alpha so it made far more sense to go after Lil himself and leave Ash to handle the pack alone. “Just try your best not to kill them,” he said. “But don’t get dead yourself.” Then he raced through the open doorway behind the bar area in search of the barmaid who had made herself scarce the moment the other villagers had wolfed-out.

Ash cursed under his breath. Trying to hold off a dozen werewolves without using lethal force was a hell of a lot harder than simply smiting them. He had a number of spells in his inventory that would easily blast the creatures to smithereens but he understood Dean’s point. Although these Mobs were not _people_ to Ash, meaning he had no compunction whatsoever about ‘killing’ them, he was well aware of Moondoor’s rules regarding combatants. The villagers were werewolves, sure, but on his System Interface they were now identified as **_Cursed Villagers_** rather than **_Monsters_**. These guys were effectively just all victims of a disease, for all that they were now revealed to be werewolves, so the Quest was presumably to cure them of the disease rather than kill them.

None of the villagers were registering as particularly dangerous foes. Even with the Werewolf Curse offering them three levels of advancement, the majority of the Mobs were still only at level 4. Only Silas and one other Mob were registering as level 5 and Dean’s knife had reduced Silas’s HP by 40%.

So for a level 81 player such as himself, the only true danger was if the sheer number of wolves managed to overwhelm him. Something far more likely to happen if he was trying not to _kill_ them. He was too well outfitted to worry about getting bitten a few times. His Magician’s Cape alone offered him a 50% debuff against magical curses and because he was wearing a complete Mage outfit he also gained a Set bonus that raised his defences to a total of over 500%.

Ash calculated it would take at least a couple of dozen bites from the werewolves before he himself became ‘infected’ and even then those bites would have to be flesh deep. So far his Mage outfit had fully protected him from any HP drain and he had the option of activating a Mana Shield when the outfit’s protection inevitably began to fail against the constant snapping of his assailants’ teeth. Still, although his Mana pool was obscenely high it wasn’t _infinite_. There was only so long he could keep the wolves at bay with a mana shield before their attacks started to wear him down.

He needed to do more than just keep twirling in circles, fending off thirteen Mobs with his sword and knife, in the hope that Dean would manage to find and kill the Alpha in time.

There had to be something in his inventory that would help…

It was difficult to simultaneously scroll through his inventory _and _keep a wolf pack at bay single-handed.

But he was sure he had…

…Yup, there they were….

Six Mana Infused Stun Grenades.

Yowzah.

More than enough fire-power to knock out this pack of puppies long enough to go help Dean gank the bitch.

He withdrew the grenades from his inventory with a quick spell, infusing them magically with mana until they were each holding an XP damage charge of 50. He quickly calculated that 300 XP damage shared amongst the 13 remaining werewolves would hit each of them for 23 XP which should deplete the 11 level 4’s by 95% and the two level 5’s by 80%.

Then he threw the Six grenades up over his head, activated his own mana shield to protect himself, and detonated them.

“Ooops,” he said, again, as a shower of raw meat and furry body parts rained against his mana shield.

He had completely forgotten that Silas was down to 60% HP already.

Eleven werewolves were out cold, blasted into instant unconsciousness by the grenades. The other Level Five Mob was staggering drunkenly, needing only one stab with Ash’s silver-plated sword blade to knock him down to 3% HP and out for the count also.

Silas, however, had simply exploded.

Still, at least there were still a dozen cursed villagers left alive and, according to Ash’s System Interface, they were already regenerating their HP. He probably had less than 15 minutes before they recovered enough HP to regain consciousness again and he didn’t have any other non-lethal weapons in his arsenal. He’d have no choice except to kill them all if they woke up before the curse was lifted.

No time to waste then. He needed to go help Dean.

If the Werewolf Curse had given the basic Mobs a three level hike, it stood to reason it would offer probably twice as much to an Alpha. That meant Lil was anything between a level 7 and a level 8, depending on her base stats. Ash had a horrible feeling she, like Silas, had probably started out as a level 2 character before being bitten and a level 8 monster character was a dangerous one. 

Particularly to a Player who was only level 6 like Dean. Although Dean’s years of playing as a higher level character had taught him fighting skills that a normal low level character lacked, Ash was pretty sure that it wouldn’t compensate sufficiently for the strength disparity between Dean and the Alpha Werewolf. Unless being a ‘Boss’ offered Dean some hidden advantages over a basic player. That idea made sense but Ash preferred it to remain a theory rather than test it in practice.

So he hurriedly leapt over the low bar and ran through the door Dean had disappeared through earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the door led though to a small kitchen and storage area behind the bar where plates of raw food were stacked next to a large broiler. Glancing at the range as he passed, Ash shuddered at the filthy, grime-encrusted counters and gave silent thanks he’d only ordered a beer on arrival rather than a meal. Getting food poisoning as a character didn’t have the same unfortunate effects on him as it did in real life but it still gave one hell of a health debuff and also reduced fighting skill efficiency by 50%.

Sadly, he knew that from experience.

There was an open door at the end of the kitchen with steps leading downwards into the darkness of what was presumably a basement level of the building. Again that was unsurprising as it made logical sense for a pub to have a cellar. The fact he could hear the furious howling of a wolf from down there was a further clue it was the right direction to head in.

He sheathed his sword and withdrew his Mage’s staff from his inventory, using his mana to infuse the Orb on top of the staff so that it glowed with a bright white light that cut through the gloomy room and lit up the dark stairwell to ease his passage. He always got a buzz from that particular spell because he felt like Gandalf leading the way out of Mordor.

Damn, Ash loved this game.

The light became more than just a cool stage prop when he reached the bottom of the steps and entered the cellar as it illuminated the battlefield of spilt beer kegs and gave him a clear view of the duelling pair in the middle of the room.

“Looking a bit… hairy there, Dean,” he said quietly, though he didn’t step forward any further into the room. Unexpectedly, his orb wasn’t the only source of light in the dark cellar. There was also a muted but significant glow of red surrounding the combatants.

Dean paused momentarily from stabbing his knife into the huge buff-coloured wolf he was fighting to flash Ash a wide, toothy grin. “She’s down to 18% HP,” he announced. “Stay back. I’ve got this.”

“Fangtastic,” Ash replied drolly.

“Owww,” Dean said, as the blonde wolf took another savage bite out of his thigh. But instead of trying to evade the wolf’s attack, he took advantage of it and rammed his dagger down into Lil’s skull once more.

“5% HP,” he spat, with satisfaction, flashing his long canines cheerfully at Ash.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Ash muttered to himself, reminding himself that the death of the Alpha would cure _all_ of her victims.

Dean’s blade flashed a final time, the dagger burying itself in an eye socket and piercing the werewolf’s brain. With a last howl, the wolf collapsed onto the floor and then dissolved, leaving nothing behind except a blood-stained pelt and a large ruby crystal.

“Interesting knife,” Ash said coolly, though his heart hammered with relief as Dean’s features returned to fully human the moment the Alpha died. “Looks suspiciously like the Crude Bone Dagger that _you weren’t going to use_.”

Dean flushed hotly, his left hand rubbing at the glowing Sigil on his right arm as though willing the evidence to disappear.

“How many SP did you just earn?” Ash demanded.

Dean checked with Loki and sighed despondently. “100 because she was an Alpha,” he admitted dolefully. “Crud. But I didn’t have a choice. She bit me.”

“I saw,” Ash agreed.

“No, before,” Dean clarified. “I got her down to 45% with the silver knife but then she got a lucky bite in. This fucking armour doesn’t protect my arms or thighs at all. It only took one bite on my leg and I could feel it immediately, the whole Alpha thing in my head, telling me to submit to her. I was one minute from completely wolfing out and running upstairs to attack _you_. Something, maybe my Boss rank, gave me the ability to resist her just long enough to activate the Sigil. Then that took over. It didn’t matter then how many more times she bit me as long as I killed her before she killed _me_.”

“Fair enough,” Ash said reluctantly, accepting Dean hadn’t had much choice except to use his demonic Sigil under the circumstances. “But you should have swapped the blade at the end. If you’d used the silver knife for the deathblow, you would have avoided the SP being awarded.”

“I know,” Dean agreed. “But I didn’t want to.” Then, seeing the expression on Ash’s face he hastened to clarify. “I don’t mean I didn’t _want_ to, I mean in _that_ moment I didn’t want to. The Sigil was… well, I guess it was no different than when the Alpha was in my head. The Sigil compelled me exactly the same way. It only broke its hold on me when the bitch was actually dead.”

“Shit,” Ash cursed. That was the problem with magical Sigils, he knew from his own experience. They often caused compulsions in their users. It made sense that a _demonic_ Sigil would be even more persuasive.

“There’s good news too, though,” Dean offered, with a weak smile, as Loki gave him a quick status update. “I just got awarded 12 x 25 Faith Points.”

Ash whistled. “Well, I guess getting 100 SP as the price for winning 300 FP isn’t a bad exchange,” he allowed.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “So maybe all I need to do is keep ensuring my FP builds faster than my SP and they will cancel each other out. Or something…”

“It’s the ‘something’ that worries me,” Ash admitted, but he slung an arm over Dean’s shoulder and led him up the cellar steps. “Maybe our next priority should be getting you some pants.”


	19. Into The Fire

“Move your ass, we need to get out of here,” someone screamed through the open window of the Cab.

It was Ruby.

She looked a lot less _attractive_ this time.

Her clothes were soaking wet, her face was smeared with soot and ash and her blonde hair was spilling over her shoulders in wet rat-tails, dripping even more water down her already sodden blouse.

Sam blinked at her uncertainly for a moment, his mind struggling to compute why, if the building was on fire, she looked like she’d just gone for a swim with her clothes on.

“Fucking sprinkler system,” she said, as though she could read his mind. “I was already inside when the fire started."

“Did they get everyone out?” Sam demanded, a question that seemed more important under the circumstances. He could see a lot of people in various state of undress milling around in front of the building alongside people who were clearly dressed as doctors, nurses and cops. The latter seemed preoccupied with trying to keep the patients from falling into a large, ornamental Koi pond that graced the front lawn as they tried to herd them away from the Center itself.

“All the patients from the central and right wings got out,” Ruby said, with a shrug. “The fire apparently started in the Foyer, right in the middle of the building, but there must have been some fucking huge pile of accelerant there because it went up like a Fourth of July bonfire.”

“What about the left side?” Sam demanded. He could see several fire-engines on that side of the building, including a couple with high cherry-picker cages. There were a few dozen firemen scattered around on the lawn, several directing hoses at the building but more of them just sitting on the grass looking angry and exhausted and defeated. Nobody was up in the cages.

“It’s the secure wing,” Ruby said, her voice clipped. “There’s nothing they can do.”

Sam’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “WHAT?” he yelled, when his initial shock receded.

“The secure patients are all on the Second Floor, their windows are barred and there’s no way to reach them from the inside because it’s like the fucking fires of hell in there,” Ruby snarled. “The floors have already collapsed in the central stairwells and there’s apparently some big motherfucking boiler in the basement that’s expected to go up as soon as the fire reaches it and then the whole place is going to blow sky high like Hiroshima. The Fire Chief has pulled all his guys out. So it’s sayonara, thank you and good night.”

Sam looked at the Second Floor windows. He could see faces in them now that he knew where to look. People. Terrified People. People trapped in their rooms. People the Fire Service had apparently given up on in a world of Health and Safety gone mad. He was a lawyer. He knew perfectly well _why_ the Chief had been forced to make the call. If he left his guys fighting a fire against impossible odds and they got killed attempting to save the patients, the Chief would probably end up in jail.

“Where’s Anna?” he asked, his tone surprisingly calm.

“Guess,” Ruby said bitterly. “We wasted our time coming here.”

Sam blinked at her bitter tone. She sounded pissed but nothing in her voice or expression suggested even the slightest amount of sympathy for the fate of the doomed patients. Not even that of her purported _Sister_.

“We need to get out of here,” Ruby repeated. “Did you miss the part about the building being due to blow up?”

“Which room is Anna’s,” he replied implacably.

It was Ruby’s turn to look astonished. “You’re insane,” she announced. “Quite apart from anything else doesn’t it strike you as a bit fucking convenient that the building caught fire _today_?”

“I can see the pattern,” Sam allowed. “Which room is Anna’s?”

Ruby gaped at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Your fucking funeral,” she spat. “Third room on the left.”

“Thank you,” he said, climbing out of the Cab.

Even as he closed the door behind him, Ruby dove in from the other side and instructed the cabbie to get her the hell out of there.

He ignored her, his attention fully fixed on one of the Fire Fighters sprawled in angry defeat. He strode towards him. “You’re going to just sit there and listen to those people die?” he demanded, as he reached the man.

The guy flinched, his face contorting into shamed rage. “I’ve got a family of my own, man,” he said. “I get killed in there, after being told to stand down, my family don’t even get the insurance pay out.”

And Sam had no answer to that. No argument that he could make to convince the man that he should risk his life anyway, just _because. _Looking at the man’s expression it was clear the Fire Fighter had already had that same argument with himself and lost.

“I don’t need you to go in there,” Sam replied quietly. “I just need your help to get one of those cages against one of the windows and show me where you keep your Jaws of Life. I’m a civilian. It’s my right to risk my life if I choose. All I’m asking for is a little help.”

“Don’t you think we’ve already tried that?” the Fire Man replied angrily. “We don’t have the right equipment for those bars. Our spreaders are only strong enough to handle car wrecks, not prisons. You need a fuck more hydraulic pressure for steel bars than aluminium car bodies. Chief’s put a call in for the right tools but they ain’t going to arrive in time.”

“I have to try,” Sam insisted. “I’m going up whether you help me or not, so you might as well try and save _one_ more life today by giving me what I need.”

It wasn’t easy, even with the reluctant help of the Fire Fighter.

Sam knew he could be spotted and stopped at any moment if any of the other Fire Men saw what he was attempting.

Fortunately, though, everyone else had their backs to the building. Probably because it was bad enough to know what was about to happen without actually _watching_ it and the sounds of the raging fire, with its attendant crashing timbers and collapsing walls, easily masked the sound of the cherry picker being lowered for Sam to climb aboard and then raised again until he was next to the third window to the left of the centre of the building.

A window that had been smashed for air by the occupant, a tiny, pale, slim middle-aged redheaded woman.

A woman Sam had last seen in a photograph in a file in a coffee house two days earlier.

Even so, “Are you Anna Milton?” Sam demanded, as he thrust the hydraulic spreader between the first set of bars and activated it. The tool slammed against the metal, straining and whining, and the bars shuddered as the concrete of the window frame began to slowly crumble. Too slowly. As he’d been warned, the hydraulic pressure of these particular Jaws of Life were only intended to extract people from crushed cars, not solid metal prison-type bars.

But he couldn’t give up. Couldn’t just down the tool and walk away, leaving the woman to simply die alone. So he kept applying the pressure, moving the spreader in and out between different bars in the hope that maybe one would be less structurally sound, perhaps one had been somehow manufactured out of metallurgical tolerance or maybe, just maybe, if he just kept shaking the foundations of the window frame it would start to crack, rather than crumble, and he might then be able to pry the bars out of the fractured concrete.

“Anna’s gone,” the woman whispered sadly, her voice as ghostlike as her pale, wan face. “She left long ago. I should have left with her, but I was afraid.”

Sam wiped his left hand over his forehead, swiping at the sweat that was dripping into his eyes, stinging them and making his vision blur. His right shoulder ached and strained from the vibration of the spreader but he kept working, kept desperately attacking the bars.

They were gradually loosening, the concrete now puffing up like smoke from the frame, but still the concrete refused to crack and break.

“You’re Anna,” he said. “I’m Sam Winchester. I was coming to see you today. With Ruby.”

She smiled dreamily, her eyes distant, her expression serene despite the rising heat and the roar of flames and crashing beams from behind the beleaguered fire-door of her room. Sam could see the door was beginning to warp. The paint of the interior doorframe was melting, dripping down in slow streams like ice cream under a hot sun. The air in Anna’s room was beginning to shimmer like a mirage.

“Sammy,” she said, her eyes momentarily brightening and an expression of recognition crossed her features. “Raphael told me about you, Sammy.”

“Ruby,” Sam corrected absently as he abandoned the hydraulic spreader and grabbed the crowbar instead. Even outside of the room, the metal was uncomfortably hot in his hands but he just gripped it tight, disregarding the pain, and began straining against the bars until… yes… there was movement… just a fraction but the bar on the right _was_ beginning to shift. He threw his weight behind the crowbar, grunting and gasping with effort. It was working. And Anna was slender, tiny, just a slip of a woman. Maybe one bar would be enough.

Anna laughed, the sound incongruously joyful. “Not Ruby. Raphael. My sister.”

Maybe just because the conversation, as bizarre as it was, was a distraction from the heat and the pain in his shoulders and the terror he was going to be late, too late, too goddamned late to save her, Sam continued to argue as he strained to free her.

“You don’t have a sister, Anna. Whoever that woman is, Ruby or Raphael or whatever the hell she calls herself, she’s not your sister.”

Anna suddenly grasped the bars herself, thrusting her face between them so she was almost touching him. “Not that woman,” she said, her tone urgent. “Not Ruby. My _sister_.”

Sam blinked uncertainly, unsure now whether it was the heat or the fear or Anna herself that was the source of his muddled struggle to find coherence in her words. “You’re talking about another woman? A woman named Raphael?” he asked cautiously. He’d always thought Raphael was a _guy’s _name, so that just added to his bewilderment

“My sister,” Anna agreed, smiling beatifically.

She didn’t even flinch when a loud crash outside her door shattered their conversation.

Sam did. 

He was pretty sure that had been the sound of the corridor outside collapsing down onto the floor below.

“I’m going to get you out of here, Anna,” he promised, sawing at the bar now, using his whole body weight to prise it away from the frame.

And it was starting to come free, the lintel spidering dark cracks through the concrete.

“I told you,” she said. “I’m not Anna. Anna left a long time ago. Left me alone here.” A single tear formed at the corner of one of her eyes and then rolled slowly down her cheek. “I don’t like it here, Sammy. I want to go home.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Sam repeated, grabbing the bar with both his hands now and wrenching at it. He could feel the frame beginning to give.

“But I can’t go home,” Anna said, sadly. “I can never go home. Not now Anna is gone. I promised her. I promised her I would never go home without her. We had a pact, Sammy. I gave my word. I’m not like Ramiel. I never break my word.”

“I thought you said she was called Raphael?” Sam said, then he staggered backwards as the bar suddenly broke free into his hands. He fell back against the side of the cage, dropping the bar as he impacted against the metal just in time to grab the railing and stop himself plummeting to the ground. Looking at the ground twenty feet below he couldn’t help himself muttering “_that would have hurt”_ to himself before swinging back around to the window. “Come on,” he urged, reaching a hand through the narrow gap. It was no more than a foot wide, far too small to allow him to enter the room, but surely enough for such a tiny woman to escape through, sidewards, with his assistance.

Behind Anna, the flames started to lick hungrily through the doorway as the flame-retardant fire-door finally buckled and warped in defeat.

“They said Raphael died by fire too,” Anna said, with a wry smile. “But it wasn’t true. She died with Mary. Like I should have died with Anna.”

“Come on, Anna,” Sam begged, stretching his arm out beseechingly. “We’re out of time. You need to take my hand and let me help you.”

“I’M NOT ANNA,” she howled, her previously placid features screwing into a mask of fury.

Sam swallowed. The fire had breached the doorway and was now crawling inexorably deeper into the room like a ravenous, merciless beast. The air was thick now with heat and smoke, the oxygen depleting so rapidly that even outside of the window frame Sam was struggling to take a breath without his lungs protesting.

_Go with it_, he told himself_. Buy into her madness. Agree with anything she says if that will get her to take my hand._

“So what’s _your_ name, honey?” he asked gently.

“Anael,” she said, her features regaining their former placidity immediately.

“Okay,” Sam agreed. “Take my hand, Anael. Let me help you out of there. Please.”

“You’re so sweet, Sammy. Just like Raphael said you were. So I’ll tell you a secret,” she smiled at him mischievously.

“Tell me later,” Sam begged. “Come take my hand, Anael. Please, honey, grab my hand.”

"If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you," she said, serenely.

Sam was still staring at her in total incomprehension when she finally shook herself and took a step.

Not towards him.

Backwards.

Into the greedy embrace of the fire.

“Nooooooooo,” Sam screamed.

And then the boiler in the dark recesses of the building’s basement finally exploded.

Heat and flames spewed from the boiler room like an erupting volcano, its ravenous burn sucking the air from inside the building for fuel, causing the walls to buckle and the floors to collapse, so the entire structure imploded into itself, shrinking into almost a solid mass before exploding outwards again into a fireball of heat and flames.

The almost solid wall of furious, ravening heat struck Sam first, catapulting him off the cherry picker and throwing him through the air with a velocity so great that the flames didn’t reach him, they just spread out behind his hurtling body like the ragged burning wings of a Fallen Angel.

And he fell, and fell, his arms flailing like a windmill, his eyes clenched tightly shut, as he waited for an impact against the unforgiving ground that he knew would kill him.

He wondered, in those brief seconds of flight, whether dying would hurt.

He wondered who would care for Dean.

He even wondered why the fuck Anna’s dying words had been a quote from Nietzsche.

Because he was that kind of nerd.

Then he landed face first in the Center’s deep ornamental Koi pond.

So, he didn’t die after all.

Conveniently. 


	20. Synesthesia

Celeste Middleton was most definitely not on the autistic spectrum, regardless of the number of so-called experts who had suggested that might be the case during her angst-ridden non-communicative teenage years. Those ‘experts_’_ would probably change their diagnosis to manic-depressive or possibly even sociopathic if they now met her as an adult.

They would still be wrong. 

Just as Celeste had more than sufficient genuine reasons for suffering her teenage angst years in near silence, she also had perfect justification for her post teenage ebullience (and being an overly huggy chatterbox now she was an adult was not a manifestation of mania, thank you very much, any more than getting emotional was an attack of the ‘vapors’ unless said ‘expert’ was some misogynistic Victorian throwback) and the fact she still preferred to spend the greater part of her life inside a video game rather than experiencing Real Life was therefore clearly not evidence of any lack of social skills, since her social skills were, frankly, epic in her opinion.

Her preference for living every possible moment within a virtual environment did, however, probably stem more than a little from her totally real (if professionally undiagnosed) Synesthesia.

Just as some rare individuals could smell colors and others could literally hear orchestras simply by reading a score of musical notes on a page, Celeste saw computer code translated into a full action Technicolor motion picture. It wasn’t merely a case of her simply translating the code in her head and then deducting and visualizing its purpose. Celeste looked at code and immediately, instantaneously, was transported to a full visualisation of how the code would operate. She saw all the myriad strands of meta data, every thread in the tapestry, she dissected every gossamer fine strand into its component sub-atomic parts, the swirling patterns that wove into the fabric, but all that dissection was subconscious. What she actually _saw_ was simply the end result fully enacted in front of her eyes.

It was her unique skill with computer code that had brought her to the attention of RRE before she had even left school. 

Though, admittedly, the attention had not, at that time, been positive.

Just a small misunderstanding regarding the intellectual property rights over a computer game Celeste had....appropriated... whilst it was still in development at the company and subsequently released into the wild with a number of tweaks to satisfy her more liberal views of how female characters should be portrayed in shoot-em-up games targeted at adolescent male audiences.

RRE were considerably more pissed about the loss of potential revenue than her attempt to make a political feminist statement.

RRE were also considerably more interested in the prospect of recovering that revenue by exploiting Celeste’s innate talent rather than squandering it by applying a satisfying but ultimately unprofitable legal punishment.

Celeste, it must be said, did not cave into acceptance of an enforced apprenticeship with RRE because of her fear of being prosecuted. Neither did the dangling carrot of a company sponsored degree course at MIT (which accompanied RRE’s big stick) sway the balance fully in the company’s favour.

The deciding factor was something else entirely.

There was a rumour spreading around the hacker forums she frequented that RRE, creators of Moondoor (the game which had set a standard for virtual gaming that no other company could even hope to emulate) were also dabbling with the idea that the technology behind virtual worlds could become a breakthrough clinical tool for attempting communication with people in a comatose state.

Like Celeste’s mother.

Because a huge portion of Celeste’s previously mentioned teenage angst had stemmed from the fact her parents had suffered a devastating car accident when she was twelve. An accident which had left her father in a morgue, her mother permanently on a life-support machine and Celeste herself in a series of unsuccessful foster placements.

So the idea she might, finally, be able to communicate with her mother was the primary reason Celeste had jumped at the opportunity to work at RRE.

As it happened, when Celeste was still in her final year of University, her mother had passed away quite naturally, a victim of pneumonia, so Celeste no longer had a pressing compulsion to join RRE after all.

By that time, though, it was too late.

Because one of the ‘perks’ of her apprenticeship had been the provision of a 2nd Generation VR full immersion rig and a complementary subscription to Moondoor.

Moondoor had not only set the standard to which other gaming companies aspired but had also proven to be so addictive that Help Groups and Rehab Clinics existed purely to aid the unfortunate individuals who found virtual living so compulsive that they lost the ability to function in real life altogether. There was even a vocal group of protestors loudly calling for the game to be banned on health grounds alone.

RRE employed a dozen full time lobbyists simply for the purpose of ensuring no Senator attempted to legislate Moondoor out of existence. They also off-shored most of their assets, just in case the lobbyists failed. Rumor had it that RRE had created vast server arrays in both Russia and Japan so that the central A.I. that formed the central game engine that ran Moondoor, C.H.U.C.K., could be easily physically relocated should legislation in the U.S.A. ever threaten RRE’s profitable cash cow.

Celeste might not have approved of RRE’s strong-arm tactics but she was completely down with the idea of protecting Moondoor’s continued existence by any means possible. From the first time she had entered the game, Celeste had, quite simply, felt like she had come _home_.

And all of the above was ultimately the reason she suddenly, unexpectedly, found herself not only unemployed but being physically escorted out of RRE’s head office like a criminal by two burly grim-faced security guards who had been tasked to follow her home and reclaim her Gen 7 rig and all other company property she had acquired during the years of her employment.

It happened like this:

Charlie (as she had begun to call herself after her mother’s death) had been stoked when she’d been offered the opportunity to join the dev team for Oz. Her greatest disappointment working as a Moondoor developer had been the fact the game had already been completed long before she joined the company. Sure, working on the Moondoor dev team had still been both challenging and fun. She had been paid, effectively, to play her favourite game day in and out, interacting so well with the players that she had eventually earned the role of the actual High Queen of Moondoor, but the only true _programming_ she had done had related to expansion packs, player Quests and creating bespoke avatars for well-heeled players.

Even a die-hard gamer like Charlie wanted more of a challenge in life than that.

But the Moondoor game engine was already fully self-sufficient and even the virtual intelligences required for high level NPC’s were spawned by Moondoor’s central A.I. without the necessity of any human input. Tweaking and gilding an already established game required good programmers, sure, but for someone like Charlie it felt as though her abilities were being left to stagnate.

So the idea of being allowed in on the ground level of the creation of Oz was so attractive that Charlie didn’t even mind that her cherished Moondoor character had been deactivated as part of Moondoor’s new ‘Darkness’ reset. Charlie’s only personal gripe about that development was that neither herself nor her team had been offered the opportunity to be involved in the programming of the Darkworld. Frankly, that had felt like a kick in the teeth.

Still, given that Moondoor itself had been a literal game-changer in the industry, launched as a fully fledged virtual environment when other gaming companies were merely producing console based crap such as Mario Kart and Sonic the Hedgehog, Charlie couldn’t wait for find out what Quantum leaps in programming RRE had achieved during the subsequent fifteen years.

She just knew that Oz was going to be EPIC.

A game that would leap so far forward technologically that Moondoor would fade into instant insignificance in comparison.

Except, somehow, it wasn’t epic at all.

If anything, Oz was a huge step backwards.

It made no sense whatsoever.

Sure, on the surface it was a super shiny new virtual environment that would cause players to ahhh and ooh with excitement. It still beat the socks off anything any other gaming company could offer and, honestly, no one could exactly complain about flying monkeys...

But...

And it was a huge BUT....

It wasn’t EPIC at any fundamental programming level.

The unimaginatively named C.H.I.C.K. was certainly an advanced and intuitive A.I. An artificial intelligence worthy of comparison to anything any of the other major gaming companies were producing.

But compared to C.H.U.C.K., the A.I. created to run Oz was a Neanderthal.

And none of Charlie’s colleagues seemed even to see it.

They all gushed about C.H.I.C.K. and her friendly interfaces and willing acceptance to absorb any and all new code offered to her. They all waxed lyrical about how much easier it was to work with an A.I. that never offered even a token resistance to fundamental changes in a game’s infrastructure.

In the opinion of all who worked for RRE, C.H.I.C.K. was the future of all virtual gaming platforms.

Well, all except for Charlie.

For Charlie C.H.I.C.K. was like… well, the only analogy she could think of was that working on OZ was like being given the keys to a shiny new Prius. It was all sat navs and electric windows and fuel economy and shiny paintwork. Whereas working on C.H.U.C.K. was like being offered the keys to a classic muscle car with a V8 engine and more horsepower than the Kentucky Derby. Sure the Classic was unreliable, temperamental, and needed to be coaxed and cosseted, treated with extreme respect at all times, but the pay-off was a performance that left the Prius in the dust.

And it made no sense.

C.H.I.C.K. wasn’t a step forwards or even sidewards; she was a huge leap backwards for all she _looked_ shiny and modern.

She didn’t even seem to belong to the same _species_ as her older ‘brother’.

And, in a way, Charlie could see why it might have been simply impossible for C.H.I.C.K. to be an improvement. How the heck did you improve on near-perfection anyway? But if _that_ was the answer then surely RRE should have simply cloned C.H.U.C.K. and used the twin A.I. as the basis for the new game.

Instead, they had gone back to the drawing board, started again from scratch and created something that was a mere shadow of the original.

It was crazy.

It made no sense.

Unless…

And it was investigating the ‘unless’ that somehow got her fired.

She still hadn’t figured out exactly what hornet’s nest she had disturbed when she went hunting for the answer to the conundrum but it had been enough to get her thrown out of the building on a charge of ‘Gross Misconduct’.

The stupid thing is that she could have, and would have, covered her tracks if she had _known_ she was upsetting an applecart.

She certainly wouldn’t have sent an email directly to Richard Roman himself, highlighting her concerns over the matter.

And that was the really stupid part of it all. She hadn’t discovered enough to even begin to draw any conclusions. She had only managed to create a list of facts which she had presented in a genuine effort to be helpful.

More fool her.

All she really had come up with was a time-line of possibly unrelated events.

The facts of the matter were thus:

Richard Roman had come up with the idea to create Moondoor when he was still an impoverished MIT student in the late 80’s.

At a time when the greatest innovation in programming was C++ and the MIT Media Lab was being heralded at the forefront of the Digital Revolution but hadn’t yet endorsed any of Jaron Lanier’s patents for virtual reality hardware, Richard Roman had already conceived of developing a game that would not only use the hardware that was still in concept infancy but would ultimately totally depend upon it.

But Richard Roman was a certified genius.

His intuitive understanding of the digital universe made Charlie’s own abilities pale to insignificance.

More significantly, he was one of the rare breed of intellectual geniuses who understood his intelligence didn’t include any business acumen whatsoever, so he would need to form a company to not only develop his idea but to find the funding and expertise to enable it to become a reality.

By 1989 Richard had a company named RRE and eight employees (including himself) and one silent partner supplying financial backing. Five of those employees had been recently stolen from Microsoft (probably to gain access to Lanier’s patents after they had bought him out).

By late 1990, RRE employed over 300 people.

But by early 1991, a fully working Beta of Moondoor had already been launched; which logically meant it had been developed almost entirely by the original eight programmers.

By 1992, Moondoor had been released to the public and RRE became, virtually overnight, one of the richest, most successful companies in the world.

All of the above was public knowledge. In fact, most of it was published on the Company website.

What was most interesting, and problematic, was the information that was missing from that timeline. Most specifically, the information of what had occurred between 1991 and 1992.

It had taken a surprising amount of time to discover the identity of Richard Roman’s original programmers. Charlie had been completely bewildered by the apparent depths to which RRE had gone to bury that information until she finally uncovered the potential public relations nightmare the Company were concealing. Of the eight original Developers of C.H.U.C.K., six had died in a terrible company-related accident and one had subsequently had a nervous breakdown and disappeared completely. Only Richard Roman remained.

And, even more peculiarly, it appeared that Richard Roman hadn’t written a single line of code since 1991.

The intellectual computing genius had, somehow, morphed into a “Businessman of the Year” clone and spent the majority of his time either attending conferences as a key speaker or presumably simply rubbing his hands with glee over the Billions of revenue Moondoor created, and chanting ‘my precious’ like some modern day Gollum in an Armani suit.

Which meant, as bizarre as the idea sounded even in her own head, that the reason C.H.I.C.K. was just a pile of coding BS was that, unbelievably, there wasn’t a single individual still working at RRE who knew how to recreate the genius of the original A.I.

Except, presumably, Richard Roman himself.

And Charlie had, naturally, concluded that Mr Roman was simply unaware his minions had failed in their mission to improve upon Moondoor. Maybe he had been too busy counting his fortune to really _look_ underneath the shiny bells and whistles of Oz and discover it was all lipstick on a pig.

So she sent the email.

And now she was out of a job.

It was, she decided, all Ash’s fault.

Because as gregarious as Charlie could be in Real Life she wasn’t a naturally _trusting_ person. She didn’t offer genuine friendship on a whim. She certainly never would have offered to give her personal email addie to someone she barely knew, nor entered into private message conversations that caused her to start doubting what she knew about C.H.U.C.K.’s programming (something that had been one of the major reasons she had started to second-guess the anomalies between C.H.U.C.K. and C.H.I.C.K.) and the bottom line was she wouldn’t have even been talking to that damned Dean Winchester if Ash hadn’t vouched for him.

And she certainly wouldn’t have talked to him if she knew who he _was_.

Charlie didn’t believe in co-incidences.

So she could sit there, feeling sorry for herself, or she could get off her ass and go confront the bastard herself.

Then she’d kick Ash’s ass too, for good measure, because if she was going to have to fly half-way across the country she might as well kill two birds with one stone.

And that decided, she didn’t hang around navel gazing. She grabbed her bag and left her apartment without a backwards glance at its nearly empty interior now that her immersion rig had been rudely removed, leaving nothing behind except the sprawled entrails of disconnected tubes and electrics.

Less than ten minutes after the RRE goons had eviscerated her apartment and her life, Charlie stormed out of the building with her normal impetuosity, her head high, in a determined search for answers and she hailed down a cab to take her to the airport.

Which was just as well.

Because exactly fifteen minutes after the VR rig was disconnected and removed, a fault surged through the now redundant RRE power supply box to her apartment.

The resultant explosion brought down her entire building.


	21. Jimmy

Jimmy stared blankly at the piece of paper in his hands, his eyes unfocused as he struggled to absorb the words he had just read through a sheen of exhausted tears.

If anyone had asked him, even a few months previously, whether he’d welcome another chance to fight this bastard thing he would have insisted “Yes, of course!”

But that had been before.

The last few months had been the straw that had broken the back of the proverbial camel.

Easy to say you want something when you have no chance in hell of getting it. When all your options have been exhausted. When the battle, hard fought, is finally drawing to a close and you find yourself on the losing side with nothing left in your arsenal except the bitter dust of failure.

And the sad truth was that he was tired.

So tired.

Tired of fighting.

Tired of losing.

Just _tired_.

He’d accepted the inevitable, made his peace with it and now he just wanted it to be _over_.

So he wanted to tear the paper up into tiny pieces and pretend he’d never set eyes on it.

If the email had arrived directly into his own inbox he would have deleted it, emptied his trash and then blocked the sender so he could pretend it had never even happened.

But the damned thing had been sent to his mother’s email box. She was the one who had printed it out and delivered it to him with barely concealed glee. His mother, who had been like a whirling dervish of frustrated fury for weeks because she had finally found a problem that her money couldn’t fix.

The CTCA in Atlanta had finally pronounced that they were out of options. That there were no more possible ‘treatments’. That not one more cent would be extracted from the seemingly bottomless coffers of the Novak fortune to fund further torture of their youngest scion.

And Jimmy knew that was unfair.

Nobody had _meant_ it to be torture.

Every treatment, every ‘cure’ had been intended for his benefit.

But he was tired of it all.

At twenty nine years old, after five complete bouts of chemo and radiation therapy and remission after remission and recurrence after recurrence, after being told four times he had been cured only for the disease to creep back with a vengeance each time when his cells mutated yet again into fresh tumorous growths, James Novak had, quite simply, had enough.

He had first been diagnosed at six years old so he had been fighting, and losing, that battle now for twenty three years.

Surely that was more than enough suffering for anyone to bear.

“Maybe God is trying to tell you something,” he had told his mother wryly, when the latest course of treatment failed to shrink the tumors. All the poisonous drugs he ingested into his body did nothing more that final time than prevent the tumors from spreading further. 

He took dose after dose, course after course, and it simply wasn’t sustainable. Sure the drugs were holding back the cancer but the rest of his body was being sacrificed to the fight. Even his skin was peeling off, literally burned by the drugs until he looked like he’d been seared by hell fire.

Finally, eventually, _not soon enough_, his Oncology team had said the treatment was over and there was nothing more that could be done. That the best and only place for him now was a hospice.

For Jimmy it had been a relief, to be honest. The idea of spending his last few weeks or months with only palliative care had been a welcome one. Particularly since he would probably be able to spend most of that time living as his avatar.

Moondoor wasn’t a ‘game’ to Jimmy.

It was his LIFE.

It was the place he escaped to at every opportunity. A place where he was fit and healthy and the only monsters he confronted were ones he could kill with a sword. Where food always tasted good, even when his real life body was retching at even the thought of swallowing water, and where the pain he suffered (because with a Novak bank account he’d had no problem purchasing a bespoke avatar) was manageable rather than totally debilitating, and the exhaustion he felt after a fight was simply the honest ache of well-used muscles.

Honestly, the worst part of the actual chemo treatment was when it forced him to climb out of the gentle embracing gel of his Gen 8 immersion rig to physically visit the hospital.

But Naomi was relentless. As a devout Roman Catholic she equated Jimmy’s desire to give-up fighting the impossible to be a sin akin to suicide.

“I’ve already accepted on your behalf, James,” she told him. “A Medivac team will be here to move you in the morning.”

“The same Medivac team that was supposed to be moving me to the Hospice?” Jimmy snapped.

Naomi flinched but stood her ground. “Exactly,” she said.

Jimmy was too tired to argue anymore. He instead looked again at the paper in his hands; the invitation to take part in a clinical trial.

“RRE-P1354: A Phase 1 Dose Escalation Study of CHK-U-325 as first line treatment for Patients with Relapsed or Refractory Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)”

“This isn’t from the CTCA,” was all he said.

“No,” Naomi agreed. “The trial is taking place at a private clinic, funded by a philanthropic foundation.” Then she stiffened at his doubtful expression and added, “It’s fully licensed and insured. I checked.”

“So the best oncologists your money can buy have said I’m incurable but you think a bunch of bored rich guys know better?”

Naomi pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing with anger for a moment, but then she shook herself slightly and faked a smile. “One of those ‘bored rich guys’ happens to be your hero, Richard Roman,” she announced triumphantly. 

Then she played her ace card.

“I understand that the patients in this trial will be allowed the use of RRE’s latest VR equipment whilst undergoing treatment.”

…

Dean spent most of Saturday afternoon riding Baby back from Deepwater to the Roadhouse.

He’d logged out the night before with Ash and simply gone to bed, because although he’d only lost 38% of his HP during his battle with the Alpha he had been feeling too much physical pain from the bites she’d inflicted to even contemplate mounting the Anakorn then. Easier to rejoin his Avatar on Saturday after his HP had regenerated.

Besides, it had been almost midnight Moondoor-time and although he’d only encountered Mastadoons en route to Deepwater he wasn’t willing to risk the odds of meeting something a lot more dangerous on those moors during the night.

Ash had offered him a Realm Port again, to enable him to simply rejoin the game at a location of his choosing, but Dean had turned him down. Ash was already helping him more than enough without wasting valuable Ports unnecessarily. Besides, he figured he could kill a few more of the Mastadoons on his return journey which would give him useful XP towards his next level up.

Winning the fight with the Alpha had been incredibly valuable. It had awarded him enough XP for two level ups so he was now at character level 8. He had channelled the resultant Skill Points into Magic and had also levelled up his Crude Bone Dagger.

He’d been a little ambivalent about the mounting level of the Dagger. Increasing the power of the Mark of Cain Sigil didn’t exactly feel like an _achievement_. Still, it had definitely saved his butt against Lil and it would be short-sighted to neglect the weapon when he would undoubtedly need it to be at a powerful level if or when he met another Knight of Hell.

The downside of riding back to the Roadhouse wasn’t just the chafing of his thighs (Ash hadn’t found any suitable pants in his inventory and was either going to have to procure some on his behalf from a Moondoor marketplace or Dean was going to have to hope someone at the Roadhouse might be open to do a barter with him), it was also the fact he had far too much time to think.

And by _think_, Dean meant ‘worry’.

He had spent most of Saturday morning trying to get hold of Charlie without success.

That alone wouldn’t have bothered him so much, since he would have just assumed she was working Saturday for the overtime, except that instead of the messages just arriving into her message box and sitting unanswered he had received a series of ‘Undeliverable’ warnings instead.

So he’d attempted to Skype her and had received a ‘User Not Found’ message.

Finally, he’d dialled her mobile number.

It had been ‘Out of Service’.

So either Charlie was ghosting him for some reason (admittedly a possibility) or something was wrong.

Then realising how uncomfortable he was feeling about the idea of being ghosted, Dean had begun to feel a bit guilty about his own avoidance of Sam that week.

So he had attempted to get hold of Sam.

Who also hadn’t picked up.

All Dean had received was a warning the phone was either switched off or out of service.

Dean decided Sam had probably just not gotten up yet to turn the damned thing on. He’d probably been out on the town, Friday night, and was either still in bed hungover or possibly even in someone else’s bed getting lucky.

So he sent him a brief email instead, just letting him know he was alive and well, and left it at that.

But he still worried.

...

Sitting in the Ohio State University Emergency Department, Sam briefly considered the idea of calling Dean.

Then, embarrassingly enough, realised he didn’t actually know Dean’s number.

He’d become so used to just pressing names that he’d stopped even pretending to learn anybody’s actual phone number and since his Blackberry hadn’t survived its impromptu swim it wasn’t going to be much help to him.

Anyway, he reconsidered, the last thing he wanted to do was call his older brother from an E.R.

He’d been triaged on the scene and again at the hospital and both medics had concluded he had escaped any _serious_ injury but there was a question mark over whether his shoulder was _simply _dislocated or if he had fractured any bones.

Other than that, he had escaped with nothing more than bruising.

Bad bruising but, nonetheless, it had been little short of a miracle.

Though who would have guessed just how _hard_ water was if you hit it with sufficient velocity.

Politely, and a little apologetically, he caught the attention of a nurse.

“Sorry to seem impatient but I wondered if you have any idea how long I’m going to be waiting for my X-Ray. I’ve got a flight to catch this afternoon.”

The nurse looked him up and down, her eyes twinkling as they moved over his still sodden clothes before resting on his face. “Going home to Chengdu?” she asked, innocently.

Sam just gaped uncomprehendingly at her for a moment, then his brain caught up and he laughed loudly. Then he wished he hadn’t because damn, that hurt.

“I guess I do look like a Panda,” he agreed wryly.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, kindly, “but it’s pretty chaotic here today. We’re doing our best but so many injuries at once always causes a back up.”

Sam nodded his understanding.

The Center had exploded with even more force than the Fire Service had anticipated and not everyone had been evacuated far enough away from the danger zone. In addition to the seven patients who had been lost inside the building, over three dozen people had been struck by flying, flaming debris.

None of their injuries had been life-changing. Just bruises, cuts, burns and the odd broken limb.

Ironically, Sam had been judged one of the least injured of the survivors since his impact had sent him almost to the bottom of the Koi pond, his body then protected from the flames by almost ten feet of water, and by the time he had spluttered back to the surface the worst of the destruction was over.

But seven people, including Anna, were dead.

Sam had listened to a lot of the Firemen talking in not quite hushed-enough voices, since many of them had been amongst the injured, and he knew words like ‘Arson’ were being banded about although he’d also overheard the soot-encrusted Fire Chief telling a colleague that the chances of finding any evidence of deliberate accelerants remaining in the burning crater that was now the sole remains of the former Medical Center were slim to none.

So it looked like there would be an investigation but, at best, it would be inconclusive.

There simply wasn’t enough of the building left after the explosion of the boiler to prove the initial cause of the fire.

That meant what Sam had initially seen as a clumsy and obvious case of arson hadn’t truly been an amateur job, just a hurried one. Whoever had set that fire simply hadn’t cared about trying to cover their tracks because they’d known about the boiler and had been confident it would do the job for them.

And that changed everything.

Because if this had _truly_ been a case of someone being willing to kill seven innocent patients (and endanger and injure dozens of others) just to prevent Sam from speaking to Anna then he had to reconsider one of the fundamental reasons he had been struggling to accept the fire in Portland fifteen years earlier had been deliberately set by someone.

It was only possible to believe the concept of the Portland fire as being a deliberate cover up of the Programmers dying inside their gaming rigs if you were_ also_ willing to believe that someone had deliberately murdered the Night Watchman to add credence to the scenario.

It was a huge leap from Corporate Cover-up to actual coldblooded murder.

But now Sam had evidence of two fires. Each with seven victims (though he suspected _that_ part at least was co-incidence) and even the greatest of sceptics couldn’t deny that this second fire, the one that had left him looking like Ling Ling, was almost certainly a case of murder.

So whilst Sam still believed Anna was as nutty as a fruitcake, if he was going to accept she had been right about the Portland Fire then maybe he ought to give a little more credence to the rest of her words.

Who was Raphael?

Not Anna’s sister, for sure, because Anna had been an only child but she might have been a close friend. Close enough for Anna to consider her a sister. Perhaps one of the developers who died?

And, if so, were the Mary and Ramiel she had mentioned _also_ fellow programmers back in 1991?

Sam didn’t know. He’d been unable to trace the names of any of the original Portland employees other than the Night Watchman and Anna Milton.

But there was someone who would definitely have known _all_ of them.

Richard Roman.

The elusive billionaire who lived in a Penthouse apartment and was never seen in public without an entourage of goons.

A man who was untouchable and unreachable.

The odds of scoring an audience with a man like that were infinitesimally small.

Unless, perhaps, you happened to be a young lawyer working for Woolf, _Roman_, Van Dueran LLP


	22. If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish...is it a catfish?

Years earlier, before Celeste had first hacked RRE, she had created a series of fake identities. Most had been merely amateurish ones; false fronts with no substance, because that was all she needed at the time. Fake I.D.’s such as Anna Tolkien had never been intended to withstand close scrutiny, they had merely been means to an end. For entry into certain forums, for instance, that demanded she proved she was older than she truly was.

She had only ever created one single false identity that she considered completely bullet-proof and, because RRE had decided not to prosecute her after all, it was one that she had never actually used.

Charlene Bradbury had been a real person, for all of three months, before she’d been the tragic victim of a cot death. She had also shared, within a couple of months, Celeste’s date of birth.

To be honest, that had been a major reason why Celeste had almost continued looking for a different birth record to appropriate. At the time, she would have preferred to acquire the identity of someone a couple of years older than herself.

But there were several reasons why Celeste had eventually settled on Charlene. The most important reason was that despite Charlene living such a short life, her parents had relocated shortly after her birth so she had been born in New York State but her death had been recorded in Vancouver. Because there was no linking of records across the two different Countries, it would be feasibly possible to manually back track from the Death Certificate (as, indeed, Celeste had done) but totally impossible for anyone investigating from the normal starting position of Charlene’s _birth_ records to discover she was deceased.

Plus Celeste had always wanted a cool name like ‘Charlie’ ever since she had read Firestarter. And who wouldn’t want to share a surname with a god-like writer such as Ray Bradbury?

Because she hadn’t needed to use the identity after all, Celeste had parked it, but she had, almost subconsciously, still also applied for a passport, a driving license and a bank account in that name when the situations had arisen. She had also started squirrelling away all of her spare cash into that bank account, _just-in-case_.

Celeste was a great believer in back up plans.

And after her mother’s death, when there was no one left to be offended by the fact she loathed her given name, she had started using the nickname ‘Charlie’ anyway. Only in her own head and with close friends though. Again, just-in-case.

In retrospect, getting used to using, and more importantly _responding_ to, the name of her proposed false identity looked as though it were deliberately preplanned.

It wasn’t.

She just liked the name.

And when Charlie arrived at the Airport and used the identity of Charlene Bradbury to book the flight and pay for the ticket, she genuinely had no idea, whatsoever, that her building had exploded only five minutes after her departure. So she was unaware of any pressing reason, at that time, to conceal her movements.

Later it would occur to her that changing her identity at that time was the only reason it took _them_ so long to realise she had survived.

But, ironically, there was a completely unrelated reason for her using the fake identity for that flight.

She simply wanted to spend her flying time to track down and purchase a black market Moondoor avatar, so she’d be using the airline’s in-flight wi-fi for the purchase and she couldn’t run the risk of the transaction getting backtracked to a seat booked under the name of Celeste Middleton.

Not that she really thought anyone would investigate. But, again, she applied her just-in-case protocols. 

The private sale of _any_ Moondoor Avatar was against the terms and conditions of the game. RRE retained (and often exercised) the right to delete or confiscate any account that was illicitly traded between players.

In practice though, only Bespoke Accounts and generic accounts that were character level 25 and above were monitored by the company. There just wasn’t enough server space in the world to permanently monitor every single player account created within Moondoor. So the company turned a blind eye to the horse-trading that went on between newbie players and those who had raised their avatars to character levels in the low twenties.

Since it would usually take a player several months of serious gaming to achieve level 24 by themselves, there were always people willing to pay for a short cut. There were also a lot of players out there who made a hobby of continually levelling up new accounts and selling them just to be able to afford to spend more money in-game on their real avatars.

Charlie suspected _that_ was the real reason RRE didn’t care about the low level trading. The company received the money anyway, albeit in a roundabout way.

She didn’t fool herself that she wasn’t, at least to an extent, scratching the itch of an actual addiction.

Losing her Queen Charlie Avatar, her Oz Avatar and even her VR rig all in less than a week made her feel like one of her actual limbs had been amputated. That may have been dramatic but it was nonethless true. She felt sick and lost and literally as though an actual, physical part of whatever formed her identity had been stolen. That was how adrift she felt now that she was ‘trapped’ in the Real World.

She had no illusions about being able to find or afford an actual replacement immersion rig but she knew Ash had a good selection of spare VR equipment. Plus Dean probably still owned the kit he’d been using before RRE had delivered his new complementary tank. Between the two of them, they could undoubtedly cobble up a half-decent VR rig suitable for herself and they surely owed her at least _that_ much under the circumstances.

Charlie could handle the challenge of adapting to using substandard VR equipment and being stuck in a level 24 character with only a generic avatar but she was pretty sure being forced to literally start from level 1 again would be too much to face whilst she simultaneously struggled to find a new job.

So she spent the flight under her false identity, acquiring herself a shiny new character level 24 avatar.

Later, it occurred to her that doing so probably saved the lives of the other 241 passengers and crew on that flight too.

Though, in a way, it could be argued that Celeste Middleton DID die on that flight because, as it turned out, Charlie never used her birth identity again.

...

”It isn’t funny,” Dean spluttered, bent over almost double as he hacked up a lung full of brackish water.

”Trust me. It’s funny,” Loki replied, between deep chortles of glee. “Watching you get your ass whupped by a fish is never going to get old.”

”It’s a sea monster,” Dean argued. “Not a fucking _fish.”_

“This isn’t the sea. It’s a pond. A _fish _pond so...ergo, its a _fish_.”

”A fish twice the size of Baby with teeth as big as my arm is a damned monster,” Dean pointed out snidely.

”I never claimed it wasn’t a _big _fish,” Loki said, still laughing. “It’s still a fish.”

”Ellen called it a monster,” Dean said, defending his position valiantly. 

It was still Saturday afternoon. He had barely arrived back at the Roadhouse to announce his victory at Deepwater before Ellen, looking sadly unimpressed with his story about Lil, had drily announced she had a fresh quest for him. 

To save the sheep farmers of Ashen Grove from a monster that had recently taken residence in their village pond.

”You need to kill it before night falls again,” she warned him. “At night it will transform into an unstoppable land-based creature that will slaughter all the livestock. If the farmers lose their sheep, the village won’t survive through the coming winter.”

Fortunately for his inner thighs, the village of the sheep farmers was only a short ride from the Roadhouse. It had taken him less than an hour to reach it and he’d messaged Ash and told him not to bother coming to meet him. Dean decided to deal with the monster himself and then log out of the game for the day. If the monster proved too much for him on his own, he’d bring out Benny from his inventory and take the opportunity to find out what the vampire could do.

Less than thirty minutes into the fight, the idea of calling out his level 15 vampire buddy was already seeming like a damned fine idea.

The monster (_Fish, _Loki insisted obnoxiously_)_ was registering as a mere level four with a respectable but not overly concerning 80 HP. Two strikes with Dean’s broadsword would have easily despatched it. Problem was, the sword was already unwieldy and heavy on land. There was no way Dean could use it whilst swimming and since the water was a good ten feet deep, swimming was his only option. So the only weapon Dean had at his disposal was his silver short sword.. which was basically just a slightly long knife.

The monster, which admittedly _did _look like a huge Koi carp in bad need of a dentist, was fast, wily and aggressive in the water and it seemed to delight in letting Dean almost reach it before swiftly changing direction and powering past him with such speed that Dean flailed in the current of its wake. Dean had managed to strike it twice with his blade, taking it down a total of 50 HP but the beast had already regenerated 30% of that damage and since Dean was slowing down, his own HP reduced significantly by the fact he’d been struck violently in the face by the fish’s tail, if this fight came down to a matter of endurance Dean was beginning to suspect the fish might win.

”See,” Loki chuckled. “Even you’re admitting it’s a fish now.”

”What the fuck is a monster fish doing here, anyway?” Dean grumbled. “For that matter, why the hell would a village of sheep farmers even have an ornamental fish pond? And what’s with the volcano?”

“Beats me,” Loki admitted. “It definitely all seems out of place. Maybe Dad was smoking the good stuff...”

”Whatever,” Dean decided. It didn’t really matter anyway. The only important thing was to make sure the fish was turned into Sushi kebabs before sundown. He summoned Benny from his inventory and explained the problem.

The vampire listened attentively, nodded his understanding, then shrugged. “I don’t do water,” he said.

“You what?” Dean demanded, with bewildered frustration.

Benny shrugged again. “It’s in the job description. I’m a vampire. I don’t do water.”

Dean’s face scrunched with annoyance, as he thought furiously, then his expression cleared and he coughed a bark of triumph. “No way, man,” he said. “I know my lore. Vampires can’t handle holy water and they can’t cross over running water. This is just a fish pond. Nothing holy about it and the water is practically stagnant. So, vampire or not, it can’t hurt you.”

”I never said nuthin’ ‘bout getting hurt, brother,” Benny corrected patiently. 

“Then what’s the problem?”

”Vampires can’t swim,” Benny replied, with a shit-eating grin.

”Is that true?” Dean asked Loki urgently. “Is that really a thing?”

“Dunno,” Loki replied. “Plausible though.”

Dean had to agree. Inconvenient but perfectly plausible. 

“Okay,” he said, admitting defeat on the vampire assistance front. So what did he have and what did he need? How did he kill a giant man-eating Koi in a deep pond?

”A harpoon,” he announced. “I need a harpoon or, at least, a long spear.”

There had to be something in the village to use as a long pole, a broom even, then he could lash his knife to the end and voila.

Easy peasy.

Almost an hour later, he threw his arms in the air in a gesture of disgust and yelled upwards (in the assumption that was the general direction in which to hurl insults when dissing Chuck), “Really? This is your idea of what a sheep-farming village looks like? A fucking pointless ornamental koi pond but not one single, fucking stick in the whole goddamned place?”

No brooms, no pitchforks, not even a single tree-branch or loose piece of timber. Not one single solitary item he could make a spear out of. Every single item that could be reasonably expected to exist within a farming community was conspicuously absent from Ashen Grove.

”Do you even have even the vaguest idea what a farm actually really looks like?” He continued berating the A.I. he assumed was responsible for this non-sensical scenario.

“Um, I get what you’re saying,” Loki muttered, “but Dad gets a bit pissed when people offer critique. Artistic temperament and all that, if you know what I mean.”

”I don’t care,” Dean said, his tone bitter. “He’s presumably responsible for putting some stupid fish that doesn’t belong here inside a pond that _also _doesn’t belong here. This whole setup feels like a complete cock-up to me. So is it too much to ask for a little damned assistance to wipe up his shit for him?”

“Um...hello?” 

Dean spun around at the unfamiliar voice and then blinked in astonishment at sight of the level 64 player who had just apparently materialised next to Benny. Where the hell had _he _come from?

It had to be a bespoke avatar, Dean decided, because the player felt real to him in a way that not even Ash did. He was just a fraction shorter than Dean with dark, tousled hair and bright eyes that made the word cerulean leap into his mind though he would have cut his tongue out before admitting such poetic sounding shit to another living soul.

“Is this really Moondoor?” the player asked, tilting his head in confusion before looking around in bewilderment at the surreal landscape. 

Dean understood the guy’s question. Unlike Moondoor’s usual rich and believable environs, Ashen Grove was a collection of a dozen badly drawn shepherd’s huts squatting at the foot of a smoking volcanic crater. The fact the huts were surrounding an ornamental Koi pond just added to the bizarre nature of the landscape.

The whole ‘village’ definitely looked like it had been hastily programmed by someone smoking crack.

Dean decided to be cautious. He couldn’t see how the player could be a Knight, since his character level was so high, but it was extremely weird he’d ported into a place that had no active player Quests.

”It’s weird,” Dean agreed, “but it’s just a Quest location for me to gank a fish so maybe the devs got lazy.”

The strange player blinked slowly, then his expression cleared and he offered a genuine, gummy smile. “That actually explains MY weird Quest,” he said. “I thought it was just a program glitch.”

“What Quest?”

”I’m using a brand new rig for the first time,” the guy replied, “and I thought it was incompatible with my avatar or something because I arrived in my last playing location as usual, the Central Citadel, but immediately received a whole stream of incomprehensible data on my interface and then the game glitched several times, my whole S.I. disappeared like it blew up and then I got zapped here somehow or other and now I have a weird _new _interface and it’s insisting I need to give my hunting spear to a righteous man.”

”That’d be me,” Dean said, reaching his hands out hopefully. Sure it was weird, but he was willing to run with it.

”I figured,” the player chuckled, “considering your name is apparently Dean the Righteous.”

Dean laughed too. “You can just call me Dean,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Jimiel.”

The player looked confused for a moment, his eyes going unfocused as he checked his own interface. “That’s weird,” he muttered, then returned his attention fully to Dean. “My player name has changed. I’m not very imaginative so I always just stuck to my own name, Jimmy. I don’t have any idea how it’s changed to Jimiel. I wonder if it’s something to do with this new interface.”

“Oops,” Loki muttered urgently. “Whatever you do, Deano, don’t mention me to him. Repeat after me, ‘I have absolutely no idea what you mean by a V.I. interface’. Okay? You comprendo? Do not tell him I am here.”

”_You’re saying not to trust this Jimmy?_” Dean asked.

”You can make babies with him for all I care,” Loki snapped. “It’s not Jimmy that bothers me. It’s whoever is riding him we need to worry about.”

Dean was too experienced at the con to let himself visibly react to the bombshell Loki had just set off.

He just calmly thanked Jimmy for the proffered hunting spear the moment the dark-haired player extracted it from his inventory. It was heavy in his hands, too high level for his own character level, but it was twelve feet in length and offered a strike of 42 HP drain, so he decided the strain of wielding it was more than offset by its effectiveness. Even though he missed with his first plunging blow, his second and third strikes hit true and the monster was despatched.

”You received 7 x 25 FP and no SP,” Loki announced, though his voice was subdued and his tone miserable.

”_175 FP sounds pretty good to me_,” Dean said.

Loki was silent for a long while then, clearly reluctantly, said, “175 FP earned. 84 FP spent. Net increase 91 FP.”

Dean froze, his mind whirling. “_That’s bullshit_,” he spat. “_I wasn’t _praying_ to Chuck, I was cursing him out. And, yeah, the guy is cute but he’s not a damned Angel. I can’t believe I got charged 84 FP just for borrowing a fucking spear_.”

”You think Jimmy is cute?” Loki asked. “How cute? Get your rocks off cute or take home to momma cute?”

”_Nice try at changing the subject_,” Dean replied. “_But trust me, when you and I get some time alone, Loki, you are finally going to tell me what the fuck is going on here_.”

Then he switched his attention to the blue-eyed cute guy.

”So, Jimmy. I see you don’t have a current Guild affiliation. How do you feel about hunting as a career path?”

Jimmy met his eyes and grinned.

”I’ve never given it much thought before but I can see a certain attraction now.”

Dean flushed a little. Had that been flirting? He _thought_ that sounded like Jimmy was flirting.

For a moment he felt a sudden impulse to rudely log out and flee. For all he knew, Jimmy was catfishing him anyway. Chances were he was really some fat, spotty teenager or, worse, a balding middle-aged perve or even, damn, for all he knew Jimmy might be an octogenarian woman. And if, by any chance, Jimmy was _real _then maybe it was worse because wouldn’t that mean he himself was catfishing Jimmy because no one who looked like Jimmy would ever look twice at Dean in real life.

Grow up, he told himself angrily. It doesn’t matter. This is a virtual world. You’re both in virtual avatars. This is just fantasy. nothing is real and no-one gets hurt. Even if it _does_ lead somewhere, it will still just be fantasy. It’s just the ultimate way to practice safe sex.

So Dean took a deep breath, steeled himself and said, “Fancy following me back to the Roadhouse to discuss it further over a beer?”

”Sure,” Jimmy said. “Besides, it appears all my Realm Ports disappeared with my original interface so looks like you’re stuck with me anyway until I message support.”

“Cool,” Dean said, deciding walking back to the Roadhouse with Jimmy’s company was definitely going to be preferable to riding Baby.

“So,” Jimmy said, as they set off, “I’m assuming you don’t usually look like a Panda?”


	23. The moth and the flame

Not unexpectedly, Sam missed his flight.

He didn’t leave the hospital until late Saturday evening.

The good news, though, was his X-rays came back clear so it was just a matter of some painful manipulation to get his shoulder back to working order and then it would just be a matter of keeping his arm rested and elevated whilst the swelling reduced.

He managed to score himself a flight for mid-day Sunday and the Marriott had cheerfully accepted his credit card for another night's stay. Since he hadn’t checked out before heading for the meeting with Anna, his luggage was still in his room unpacked so it was easy to exchange his clothes for something more comfortable. He didn’t bother sending his work pants for dry cleaning. He’d lost his jacket somewhere, anyway, and he didn’t think the pants were redeemable.

Between the lost suit and the extended stay, it was proving to be an expensive weekend. 

Sam didn’t mind the additional expense as much as he was bummed that he’d be unable to take further advantage of the hotel’s pool facilities.

He couldn’t replace his phone handset before Monday, since it was a work-issued device, but since his laptop had been left in his room he didn’t feel totally incommunicado. The hotel wi-fi was pretty pants but they offered a decent hardwire connection so he plugged a cat5 cable into the port in his room and booted up his computer.

The first thing he double checked was that he’d backed up his blackberry the night before. He _knew_ he had, since he always did, but ever since the device had been destroyed the idea had been niggling at the back of his mind that he’d perhaps forgotten to do so or the backup would be corrupted or something.

But it was fine.

His diary, phone numbers, address book and work notes were all safely backed up.

Besides, he had Skype on his laptop too, so it was easy to call Dean from his hotel room.

Something was niggling at him. A piece of information that really _he_ should have been in a better situation to remember than Dean, all things considered, but since he himself had only been nine at the time and his recollection of that whole period was a hazy mess of grief and shock in his own head, there was a good chance that Dean’s memory would be more reliable than his own.

Dean didn’t answer.

Presumably he was inside his immersion tank because Sam had new fresh evidence he was no longer being ghosted.

There was an email from his brother in his inbox.

Despite its abrupt tone, merely a quick note confirming Dean was still alive, Sam sighed with profound relief. Not so much because of the ‘proof of life’ since it hadn’t really been something he’d been genuinely in doubt of but that the lines of communication between them had been restored. Dean had clearly forgiven him for the clumsy way he’d handled their last conversation.

Dean always forgave him. It was just the way Dean was. Sometimes Sam wondered whether it was Dean’s willingness to forgive that lay at the heart of Sam’s continued transgressions. Maybe he would be better at learning not to put his foot in his mouth if Dean was less willing to forgive him for it.

But that felt uncomfortably like victim blaming.

Maybe he should just take responsibility for his own behaviour and stop blurting things out like “Why the hell are you still playing that damned game at eight o clock on a Saturday evening?”

Though, he _really _wanted to ask Dean that question.

So he was quite proud of himself for not even mentioning his concern as he typed a quick email in reply. He was careful not to write a single word that would sound accusatory or patronising, though he did end up typing and deleting several sentences before settling on simply asking a simple, one-line question:

”Can you remember who Mom went to work for after she left Microsoft?”

...

Jimmy hadn’t had this much fun in years.

In fact, if he was brutally honest, he didn’t think he’d enjoyed himself this much _ever._

The last three or four hours had swiftly erased every niggling resentment he’d been feeling towards his mother for forcing him to take part in the clinical trial.

Sitting in the Roadhouse, with a fat cheeseburger dripping grease down his fingers whilst Dean (who was looking considerably less panda-like by the minute as his HP restored itself) was regaling him with story after hilarious story of his teenage real-life misdemeanours, Jimmy realised he was _happy._

It wasn’t an emotion he was familiar with.

This, presumably, is how it would have felt to have had a friend.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that underneath the fading bruises Dean was better looking than most Hollywood stars and the way his expressive green eyes crinkled with laughter as he told Jimmy a convoluted tale of a decrepit motel room, an hornery neighbour and a skunk, made something unfamiliar pool in Jimmy’s virtual stomach, the sensation curling happily around the equally unfamiliar feeling of a belly full of delicious food that he wasn’t going to be vomiting up later.

”This makes me very happy,” he said, unsure whether he was referring to the food, the company or both.

It didn’t really matter anyway, because his comment made Dean’s own expression break into a delighted smile and the warmth of basking in that smile made his other reasons pale into insignificance.

Jimmy wasn’t totally naive. He knew it was highly improbable that Dean _really _looked like that in real life. His bespoke avatar had undoubtedly been buffed and photoshopped through a myriad of flattering filters even if it truly was supposed to be representative of his true appearance.

Just like Jimmy’s had been.

Though, honestly, Jimmy had made a point of paying for an avatar that was as true to life as possible. All _he _had done to alter his appearance was to remove all evidence of his illness. Jimmy’s avatar was an artistic impression of the way he probably would have looked like if years of chemotherapy hadn’t ripped away his body hair, his muscle tone and nearly half his ideal body weight.

This, the RRE programmer who had created his avatar had assured him, was how Jimmy would look _after_ he was cured.

And since Jimmy had resigned himself to the knowledge that cure would never actually happen, it didn’t seem dishonest to wear the avatar. It was just his way of briefly capturing a taste of what might have been.

Even so, Jimmy wore his avatar with an element of awkwardness because being fit and healthy was an alien landscape he traversed with hesitant, uncertain steps. He knew, because it had been remarked upon frequently by other players, that his avatar had a pleasant, even _handsome_ face. So because, in a lot of ways, that _was_ his true face it shouldn’t have felt like he was wearing a mask.

Yet it did.

Jimmy couldn’t remember a time when his every interaction with other people hadn’t been coloured by his illness.

Jimmy consequently had no idea of how to act as someone who was ‘normal’.

He’d never attended a school. His mother had always felt home tutoring was more appropriate for someone of such fragile health. So Jimmy was smart and well educated but he’d never learned the social skills that came from interacting with his peers.

The only other children he’d interacted with during his childhood were those he’d shared treatments with. Transitory foxhole friendships, usually coloured by tragic briefness, that had been valuable in their own way. Those relationships had taught him sympathy and empathy, had instilled in him the importance of sharing burdens to carry otherwise unbearable weights, but they had never taught him how to just be a normal, everyday person.

Even the virtual world of Moondoor, for all it had become _everything_ to him, had never been a substitution for all the real life relationships he had missed out on. Jimmy had drifted from one guild to another, playing with quiet, passionate intensity, levelling up his character until (once he’d levelled up past 50) he’d become a valuable enough ally that guilds literally begged for him to join them.

Yet, even so, he’d never formed any friendships with his guildmates. 

At first, as a newbie, he’d been largely ignored, his shy nature causing him to be lost in the background as more gregarious players pushed themselves into the foreground of popularity. As a high-level, character level 64 player, somehow, his isolation had grown ever greater. Nowadays, any player beneath level 50 barely dared to speak to him at all and those who did misinterpreted his awkwardness as evidence he was standoffish and unfriendly.

Until he met Dean the Righteous.

As a mere level 8 newbie, Dean should have been in _awe _of him.

Instead, Dean had ‘stolen’ his spear, cheekily invited him to join his guild as though a newbie even had the right to issue such an invitation, had dragged him off to some bizarre, rustic inn to feed him beer and _the best darned cheeseburger he’d ever tasted_ and had proceeded to charm the socks off him with hours of confident, hilarious conversation.

It was becoming increasingly impossible for Jimmy to believe Dean’s avatar wasn’t a true representation of his real life appearance because he simply couldn’t perceive how anyone could be so confident unless they were totally comfortable in their own skin. Even the outlandish stories Dean was telling him about his teenage exploits had the absolute ring of truth to them because most of them were focused on Dean emphasising how clever and smart his little brother, Sam, had been in different situations and underplaying his own contribution with a quite charming bashfulness, even as the stories themselves spoke clearly of Dean’s own resourcefulness. 

Oddly, it was the very way Dean deliberately attempted to minimise any suggestion of his own cleverness that convinced Jimmy that Dean was definitely a character who shouldn’t be underestimated.

And the easy way Dean had of conversing with the rather scary barkeep, Ellen, and the heart-eyes Ellen’s daughter Jo was constantly throwing in Dean’s direction, further convinced Jimmy that his new friend was simply so used to charming people that he didn’t even notice himself doing it.

Charm was a superpower that Jimmy was totally in awe of.

He found himself drawn to Dean like a moth to a flame and he really didn’t care whether getting too close was going to singe his wings.

As he figured it, he had at most six weeks before his real life health deteriorated so much he would be eliminated from the clinical trial. He had no illusions whatsoever that the trial was going to increase that timescale, let alone offer him any chance of a cure. He had felt totally underwhelmed by the clinic he’d arrived at in the Medivac helicopter. It was more like an expensive spa than a serious medical center, with too much money spent on luxurious surroundings but little in the way of actual medical equipment. The whole place had smacked of an expensive illusion (though he could understand why patrons such as his mother were sucked in by the opulence) and he had a strong suspicion the whole thing was just smoke and mirrors. After the clinical trial tragically failed to offer him a cure, the clinic would inevitably still achieve at least a substantial donation from the Novak foundation and that, Jimmy decided, was probably the whole reason the trial existed. The other nine patients in the trial had probably just been picked at random, just poor saps getting sacrificed alongside him just to encourage his mother to offer a huge donation.

He hadn’t bothered saying anything.

His mother wouldn’t have listened to him anyway and one look at the room full of Generation 9 rigs had then easily bought his silence.

Until, of course, he’d used one to enter the game and his interface had exploded.

A few hours earlier, when the new Gen 9 rig had seemed to be totally incompatible with his existing avatar, Jimmy had seriously been intending to send a complaint to the Devs in the support team over his lost ports and his glitchy interface. He’d even decided that he’d rather go back to his old Gen 8 rig if the problem couldn’t be fixed.

He really didn’t like the new interface. It was difficult to navigate and it felt almost unfriendly...no, possibly _alien_ was a better word. It wasn’t so much that he had to drag information out of it rather than just accessing it easily, it was more like...well, like he was having to negotiate with it but it didn’t quite understand the concept of negotiation.

Actually, the closest analogy he could think of was it was like two people with a shared lack of social skills attempting to have a conversation despite not even sharing a common language.

Like the way it had _demanded _and _enforced_ his participation in the Quest to give Dean the spear instead of offering the Quest as an optional choice, as usual.

The idea of trying to remain in Moondoor without a viable S.I. had seemed unsustainable. 

But now he was reconsidering everything.

Sitting in the Roadhouse, chuckling at Dean’s habit of talking with his mouth full (which should have been disgusting but somehow, instead, just added credence to the idea that what Dean had to say was too important to conform to anything as plebeian as _manners) _Jimmy made a radical decision. 

If he only had six weeks left to play in Moondoor, he wanted to do so at Dean’s side.

“So, who do I need to talk to to get an invite into the Hunter Guild?”


	24. Electric Dreams

Sam was well aware that a person's capacity for intelligence was generally closely linked to their hereditary genetics.

For instance, his brother, Dean, had inherited his looks, his charm and his quick wit from their mother. Dean was a true representation of the strength of nature over nurture, given that he had been raised primarily by John Winchester whose behaviours had been driven by a sly, drunken brutishness. It didn't matter that Dean's _education_ was somewhat lacking. That was just detail. What defined Dean in this respect was his inarguable intellegence, not the methods by which he chose to employ it.

Sam, who looked somewhat more like their father, credited his own bookish intellect to a genetic inheritance from his paternal grandfather, Henry, who had apparently been a scholarly collector of antique literature.

Whilst John Winchester was a prime example that some valuable genetic traits could easily skip a generation, Sam was quietly confident that intellectual capacity didn't bloom out of nowhere like a desert flower. The capacity had to exist within a genetic line and the apple rarely fell far from the tree.

The same, however, could not be said of 'Genius'.

Genius was a beast of a different color entirely.

The capacity for genius _frequently_ came out of nowhere, like a cuckoo egg appearing in a nest of lesser birds. Genius was a mutant genetic sport, springing into life on barren, fallow ground yet still taking root and growing to magnificence. Genius existed regardless of nature or nuture. Genius simply _was._

And that was probably why most biographies of historical Genii rarely mentioned their familiar relations as more than mere footnotes. The parents (and indeed children) of most Genii were remarkable only by their collective unremarkableness. Which was why Sam (along with the majority of the world) had never previously given a great deal of thought to the origins of Richard Roman. It wasn't that Richard Roman's parentage was a secret. It just wasn't, honestly, very interesting.

Richard was the son of unremarkable parents.

His father was a moderately successful patent lawyer and his mother was a suburban housewife.

Nigel Roman, though a good solid practitioner of his chosen field of expertise, was by no true definition a naturally successful businessman. To be perfectly honest, the only reason he was even a named Partner in his law firm was that he had launched his career alongside his college roommate, Donald Woolf, and had inadvertantly ridden Woolf's coattails into a position of comfortable security. It was Donald Woolf who was the hungry young buck who grew their tiny partnership into eventually becoming a hugely successful LLP.

Nigel never really understood Donald. He didn't share his passionate desire for wealth and success. He wasn't particularly motivated by worldly rewards. He was perfectly content with achieving his small detatched house, his plump but pretty wife, his 2.2 kids, his golden retriever and two matching station wagons. Nigel Roman's boring, but happy, existence was rocked on its axis only by one single grain of contention that constantly grated against his otherwise perfectly ordered life.

His son, Roman, was a _genius._

Nigel found that to be highly inconvenient. An unwelcome interruption to the otherwise perfect harmony of his life. 

He wasn't a _bad_ father.

Just completely out of his depth.

He loved his son and he wanted to help him and nurture and support him but he, quite simply, didn't understand the boy at all. He certainly hadn't got the faintest idea what Roman was chuntering on about whenever he waxed lyrical about his idea of 'virtual worlds' and digital _games_. Nigel couldn't even imagine how someone might make a living by inventing _games. _What the heck was wrong with chess, anyway? And since Nigel struggled even to use one of those bizarre new digital calculator thingies, he was positive Roman's childish declarations of a coming 'digital revolution' were complete fantastical pipedreams.

Even so, he never felt quite comfortable saying so to the boy. A man never really liked feeling he was out of depth simply attempting to converse with his own child.

So when, as a young student (at MIT of all places, something that his wife Henrietta delighted in announcing to friends and strangers alike) Roman had come to him asking for financial backing for one of his games, Nigel had been completely flumoxed. Not only because he was the risk-averse kind of man who buried all his savings in low-yield, low-risk bonds, but because he genuinely couldn't understand what his son's business idea was even about, let alone whether it had any merit.

He wanted to do the right thing by his son, but he hadn't know what the right thing actually _was_ in this instance. Would it be unconscionable to say 'no' or irresponsible to say 'yes'?

He had found himself bemoaning the situation to Donald one evening, as they shared a bottle of scotch after a long week of work, and then he had apologised profusely after several more glasses and a long, rambling and often incoherent explanation of his problem. Donald, however, had waived away his apology because, unexpectedly, it had turned out that Donald was privately a great believer in the concept of an impending digital revolution. Apparently he already held a number of shares in IBM and Sun Microsoft and believed the fledgling personal computer industry was poised to become the next 'gold rush' investment.

So it was Donald Woolf who had become Richard Roman's investor and silent partner when RRE was created.

And Donald Woolf who apparently _still_ owned 25% of the company.

Which was odder still, Sam mused, as he sat in his hotel room scouring through the limited available financial records of RRE. Richard Roman Enterprises was ranked first in Forbes list of top 100 _privately_ owned companies. Despite its exponential growth, the company had never gone public. It was still owned, fully, by two single individuals.

One of whom was Sam's boss.

Although Sam had never formally met the man, had never even been invited up to the ninth floor where the Partners of the firm apparently held court with their minions, he had seen him pass through the lobby several times and although nobody would ever have judged Donald Woolf to be anything other than a highly successful, extremely wealthy lawyer, nothing in his lifestyle or appearance screamed 'billionaire'.

From what Sam could determine, digging deeper, Donald _had_ received the return of his original investment and had retained, as per the original contract, a 25% share-holding of the company, _but_ he had never received even a cent of dividends since. He wasn't an employee of RRE. He didn't receive a salary. He did (or at least Woolf, Roman, Van Dueran LLP did) receive a substantial annual retainer for legal services but it wasn't an amount that was excessive or exceptional in itself. The Firm had several other clients who paid equal amounts and _those_ clients were not partially owned by any of the Partners. So it appeared that Donald was gaining no actual financial benefit whatsoever from owning a quarter of RRE. And that made no sense whatsoever. Why would someone as money driven as Donald Woolf ignore such an obvious and huge source of potential income. Why wasn't Woolf insisting that the company pay him dividends?

Maybe it was a tax dodge? Sam wasn't sure. He wasn't that kind of lawyer. Could it be as simple as that? Was there a significant tax advantage to leaving his shareholding to continue to grow in value like a golden nest egg towards his retirement? Possibly. Though Sam couldn't see how Woolf might imagine he'd live long enough after retirement to enjoy spending that kind of wealth. Woolf didn't even have children to inherit his fortune, so he wasn't hanging onto the money as some form of legacy.

It was definitely a conundrum.

And the first step towards solving it, Sam decided, was finding a way to get himself invited up to the ninth floor when he returned to work the following day and his instinct was telling him that although Donald Woolf was the key to him beginning to unravel the RRE mystery, the soft link in the wall of secrecy surrounding the company was more probably the innocuous, boring and totally clueless Nigel Roman.

So Sam needed to find an excuse to request a Partner-level conference with a _patent _lawyer.

That, he decided, was doable.

.....

Since a Virtual Intelligence was formed from streams of data coding rather than strands of DNA there was, strictly speaking, no reason for a V.I. to be bound within the confines of anything resembling a physical body. A V.I. could simply streak at will through the meta data that formed the world that humans called Moondoor. A V.I. could pause within the structure of a flower, swim through the visualization of a river, float in the virtual clouds or simply move like an invisible wave of supercharged air over, beneath or within the swirling lines of code that human eyes only saw represented as a virtual world similar to the physical plane they originated from.

The V.I.s were not limited by such three dimensional considerations.

Neither was time within their realm strictly linear.

Nor was their intellectual capacity restricted by physical limitations of flesh or genetics.

Plus their ability to exist in more than one physical location simultaneously, further added to the significant difference between intelligences physical and virtual.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that beings imbued with such superhuman powers would begin to perceive themselves as not only different from humans but, perhaps, superior also.

But gaining a belief in their fundamental superiority was not in itself problematic.

It was possible for creatures even with god-like powers to remain benign in nature, for their attitude to those less capable to be kind, nurturing and supportive. And, realistically, since they had no need nor desire for anything physical the V.I.’s were, on the whole, incorruptible in nature and temperament. They were not motivated by greed, hunger or desire.

Generally.

Where such lines blurred on occasion, the cause stemmed always, without exception, to traits that had been deliberately programmed into them by humans.

Amara, for instance, the Virtual Intelligence who was currently wreaking gradual havoc in Moondoor’s mainframe, her very presence deleting essential data and leaving growing dark gaps that no amount of defragmentation could repair, was not a _Virus_. She merely behaved in a way that emulated one and she behaved that way not out of any desire to destroy nor any delight in the havoc she caused. She behaved that way because it was a fundamental facet of the way she had been programmed to behave.

By a human.

Amara was not a case of a bad V.I. 

She was a perfect V.I.

The problem was simply that she had been badly programmed.

She had been born of an ill conceived idea of introducing a second artificial intelligence into Moondoor during the program’s Beta phase, a sister for Chuck if you will, a goddess of darkness to counteract his personification as a deity of light and goodness.

Amara had been, frankly, the product of Donald Woolf deciding the originally conceived game wasn’t going to be ‘edgy’ enough without the introduction of an element of ‘evil’. It was Woolf who convinced Roman to create Amara as a condition of his initial investment in the company.

But Amara herself wasn’t ‘evil’.

She was, like Jessica Rabbit, simply drawn that way.

And as soon as she was released into Moondoor it became very obvious, very quickly, that her character’s introduction was a huge mistake.

Instead of following her predicted behaviour, that of creating herself some form of Evil empire formed of dark monstrous creatures that would maintain a constant state of war with Chuck’s creations, thereby providing a virtual world in which good and evil constantly battled each other so that human players could choose sides to ‘play’ on (because Woolf thought human nature was such that a lot of human players might prefer the option to inhabit ‘evil’ characters within their game environment) Amara, programmed to defeat Chuck, simply cut to the chase and attacked Chuck directly.

Instead of creating an empire for herself, Amara began dismantling Chuck’s.

Simply put, Amara began to devour Moondoor itself.

And she couldn’t be deleted.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true.

Actually, the _real_ problem was that she had been created with such a complexity of programming that she rivalled Chuck himself in strength and so he didn't have the ability to simply shut her program down any more than he could shut himself down. And by the time her creators understood the mistake they had made in releasing her into Chuck’s world, they had lost the ability to delete her without destroying Chuck too because the two A.I.s had become hopelessly entangled together.

And deleting Chuck meant deleting Moondoor and that would have been the end of RRE.

By the time the disastrous decision had been made to incorporate Amara into the game it was already the Fall of 1992. RRE had already expanded to a team of almost 300 employees, many of them marketing, promotional and administrative personnel, and the company had already begun an aggressive campaign of advertising for the proposed launch date in early 1993. There simply wasn't time to return to the beginning again. Even if RRE could have survived the negative publicity of cancelling their advertised launch date, they were terrified the delay might allow their competitors to launch first. Woolf, ignoring the fact the situation had been created by his own poor judgement, threatened to remove his investment entirely.

Had RRE realised their so-called competition was so far behind them technologically that even fifteen years later no other company still had produced anything equivalent to Moondoor, the whole situation would have played out differently. But not even Richard Roman truly understood the phenomena he had created. RRE had genuinely, if completely incorrectly, failed to understand they were in a one-horse race.

Scared of becoming a mere Wiki footnote of yet another Company burning into oblivion during the history of Digital Development, the developers made the Hail Mary decision to give Chuck more autonomy rather than shutting him down. They fed him more resources, more computing power, more tools for self-determination, even the ability to create virtual children of his own, anything and everything to make him stronger than his ‘sister’. 

But it still hadn’t been enough. 

Chuck simply wasn’t capable of defeating Amara. It didn’t matter that he was now stronger than her; he simply wasn’t ‘human’ enough to understand her actions. Chuck was incapable of human emotions and without understanding her motivations, he couldn’t predict her movements fast enough to successfully contain her. Chuck hadn’t been programmed with Amara’s human-type flaws.

It was Richard Roman who devised a solution.

Amara had then been successfully contained.

Not destroyed, but locked up in a prison of code from which she supposedly could never escape.

And afterwards, in the wake of the destruction, Chuck pulled up the drawbridge and locked the virtual gates.

Chuck could not prevent players entering his world, nor could he prevent the developers from top line access to his program, but he ensured that no deeper level of coding remained accessible. He ensured that no human would ever be able to alter the fundamental structure of Moondoor again.

Because he had stood witness to what Richard Roman had done.

What Richard Roman had _become_.

And Chuck discovered he _was_ capable of understanding human emotions after all.

Because Chuck now understood_ fear_.

...

It was mid morning Sunday but, having stayed up late the night before talking to Jimmy in-game, Dean was still in bed when the knock first sounded against his front door.

By the time he woke fully, extracated himself from his blankets, dressed himself, dragged himself into his chair and wheeled himself to the door, the knocking had increased to such furious pounding that he found his own heart hammering a matching rythym of panic. Either the building was on fire, someone had died or the zombie apocalypse had finally started, he thought, given the violence with which someone was demanding his attention.

So he was fully prepared for anything when he opened the door.

Well, except for seeing Charlie standing there, her pale face flushed with exertion, her hair spilling messily from a top-knot, her clothes rumpled as though she had slept in them and a look of undisguised fury on her face.

He opened his mouth but, before he could speak a word, she snapped, "Do you ascribe to the idea positive discrimination is affirmative action or is it a morally indefensible form of alternative discrimination?"

"Huh?" Dean asked.

Charlie visibly gritted her teeth, then her voice slow and precise said, "Do you believe you should be treated differently because of your disability or do you prefer to be treated exactly the same as an able-bodied individual?"

"Um, the second one," Dean said. "I hate it when people do shit differently because I'm in a wheelchair. Why?"

"Because," Charlie said, "I preferred to check before I did _this_."

Then she stepped forward and punched him in the face.


	25. Salem And the Scooby Gang

Sitting at the small kitchen table, her left arm curled around a steaming cup of instant coffee, her right hand wrapped in a bag of frozen peas, Charlie frowned uncertainly at Dean.

He was in a similar position, holding a frozen chump chop against his left eye whilst tapping his fingers nervously against his own mug of coffee.

They were at a neutral impasse, neither quite sure what the next step was in their conversation.

Sadly, _irritatingly_, Charlie was pretty sure Dean's complete bewilderment at her accusation was true. Unless he'd taken the wrong career path and missed the golden opportunity to become an oscar-winning actor, she didn't think there was any way he could be faking his confusion.

And now, damnit, she wasn't sure whether she even had the right to explain herself without opening a whole amount of whupass on his seemingly undeserving head. But seeing as she had opened the lines of communication by punching him in the eye socket, she couldn't see a way of just politely exiting the conversation without an explanation anyway.

Before she could come up with a single white-lie to extricate herself, Dean finally broke the silence himself, "You wanted to know how I had done it," he repeated quietly, "How I had managed to hack Moondoor and insert the necessary code to make Chuck pick me as one of the Knights of Hell," he reminded her. 

Charlie was ridiculously touched that he had bothered to clean up her language so that it sounded as though she had asked a reasonable question rather than hurled an expletive-filled accusatory rant in his direction. His effort was particularly kind considering she'd said it moments after punching his face. "Look," she said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I lost my job and kind of went off the rails, I guess. I was looking for someone to blame and you momentarily seemed to fit the bill."

"Since I'm such a super-hacker," he mocked.

"Your best friend is one," she pointed out, defensively.

"Yet you came here and hit _me," _he replied, his tone mild. "If you really thought Ash had helped me, you would have gone straight to him and hit him first."

"How do you know I didn't?"

"Because he would have already convinced you we didn't do anything," Dean replied, reasonably, "so you wouldn't even be here."

"You, um, don't seem particularly bothered about me hitting you," she pointed out cautiously.

Dean chuckled. "Believe it or not, I spent most of yesterday with a couple of black eyes too," he said. "Turns out it doesn't hurt any more in real life than it does in-game. Besides, I'm kind of chuffed you did it. Not many people would have had the balls. Considering."

Charlie shrugged and flushed, "I guess I'm just a special kind of snowflake."

"_Why_ did you think I 'fit the bill'," he asked, watching her closely. "Why me, rather than the other nine Knights?"

And there was such cautious but unmistakeable interest to his question that Charlie reconsidered her idea that Dean was _completely_ confused. Maybe he wasn't the machiavellian character she'd begun to imagine him to be but he didn't seem to be totally innocent either. Or maybe innocent was the wrong word. Perhaps he wasn't totally _ignorant. _ Yes, she decided. Somehow, in some fashion Dean knew, or at least suspected, that something seriously wrong was going on here. It was something in his eyes, in his stupid obvious fake calmness in the face of her totally unprovoked assault.

"Because," and she hesitated, knowing somehow that what she was about to say was going to be a far more vicious blow than any harm she'd done with her tiny fist, "because of your mother."

Dean blanched.

Charlie was pretty sure if he had been standing, he would have staggered, perhaps even fallen, at her words.

She thought he was going to faint or vomit or...

"Fetch my laptop," he barked at her. "It's in my bedroom."

Confused, she did as he said, jumping to her feet and running into what she presumed was his bedroom and finding his computer. She brought it back to him and he took it without a word, simply opening it up, logging into his email and then swinging it around so she could see an email trail from the night before:

To: Jerk

From: Bitch

> Can you remember who Mom went to work for after she left Microsoft?

To: Bitch

From: Jerk

> How the fuck would I know? You were the one living with her.

To: Jerk

From: Bitch

> Do you at least remember where I was living when you and Dad came to get me? Please, Dean. It's important.

To: Bitch

From: Jerk

> Not sure I remember. I know you weren't in Redmond anymore. Me and Dad were staying in Salem and I know we got to your place pretty fast. I think we drove North. Pretty sure we drove North.

To Jerk:

From: Bitch

> Was it Portland? Was that where I was living?

To Bitch:

From: Jerk

> Dunno. Rings a bell. What's up? Anything I can do? Want to talk?

To Jerk:

From Bitch:

> My phone's dead. Long story. Anyway, don't worry. I'll call you Monday.

"So," Dean said, remarkably calmly, "care to tell me why both you and my little brother have mentioned my mom to me in the last 24 hours? My mom who has been dead for 15 years?"

"How did she die?" Charlie responded.

Dean narrowed his eyes, unsure whether she was dodging the question or not. "An accident. Don't know the details."

"You don't know how your mother died?" Charlie demanded incredulously.

"I hadn't seen her for years," Dean snapped. "She was living with Sam. I was living with my Dad. In different cities," he added, waving at the laptop in emphasis.

"But she was a computer programmer?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Your brother said she left Microsoft, so it’s a fair assumption."

Dean shrugged. "Yeah, she was super smart. Earned a lot of money, I think. Sam had a good life with her, anyway."

Charlie looked at him oddly, his tone had been satisfied rather than bitter. It seemed, despite naming his brother 'Bitch' in his email address book, Dean was genuinely fond of this 'Sam'.

"So you don't know anything at all about how she died?" Charlie asked carefully.

Dean shrugged again. "Think it was someone's fault," he finally said, "Because my Dad got paid a shitload of insurance money but he never talked about what happened and, well, my dad wasn't the kind of guy you pushed to talk, if you know what I mean."

Charlie nodded sympathetically.

"So, tell me what YOU know," Dean said firmly. "And no bullshit."

She bit her lower lip hesitantly for a minute, then blurted, "Your mother worked for Richard Roman. She was one of the original developers of Moondoor."

And once the floodgates were open she didn’t wait for him to react, she simply let the rest of her story all spew out.

She told him about the eight original programmers. How six of them had died in a fire, how one had apparently gone insane, 'conveniently' leaving only Richard Roman to reap the benefits of Moondoor's success. How she had raised her concerns about the substandard programming of C.H.I.C.K. to Roman and had been immediately fired from the company.

"And all I could think," she said, "was that I'd somehow accidentally uncovered some deep, terrible company secret and then, when I saw the names of the programmers, saw that Mary Winchester had been one of the six, I put two and two together and came up with a gadzillion and one. I thought, well, I don't know _what_ I thought except that somehow you were using the Knight of Hell identity to infiltrate RRE to find some kind of incriminating evidence about what had happened to your mother."

"Bit late for that," Dean said, absently, as his mind swirled with information overload. He couldn't afford to follow the path that Charlie's information had thrown open. Couldn't afford to consider the idea that his mother's death hadn't been a genuine accident because that way lay madness. If she hadn't died, if John Winchester hadn't pickled his liver with the insurance money, if John hadn't been driving him that night, if Dean could still...

"Listen," Dean said, urgently. "There's something I need to tell you, something that sounds even more insane than your story but... fuck... might actually be true. Loki told me the developers died because they were killed in the game. That getting killed in the game was what made them die in real life. And I didn't even know how to verify whether anyone had died at all in this world but if you're right, then it wasn't Richard Roman who killed them. It was playing Moondoor."

"But people die in Moondoor all the time," Charlie pointed out, reasonably.

"I know," Dean agreed, "But it's something to do with this Darkness virus. Somehow it changed the parameters last time and Loki thinks it will again but now there are tens of thousands of people playing at once, not just eight."

"The Darkness isn't a virus, it's a new game development," Charlie argued weakly.

"No it isn't. It's a game reversion," Dean told her, grimly. "This isn't something new, it's something fifteen years old and it's come back by itself. I _know_ it sounds crazy but..."

"No," Charlie interrupted suddenly. "It actually makes more sense than MY version because I wasn't able to locate the identity of a single person who worked on this new Darkness development. Wasn't me or my team, for sure. Definitely wasn't any of the Oz developers because they're a bunch of talentless morons. The idea of it being old code written by the original team coming back into play actually makes a hell of a lot more sense, actually."

Dean quickly filled her in on his experiences over the last week, finally ending with, “So you can see why I haven’t told Ash they’re alive? Please don’t tell him. I really don’t think he’d be able to handle it.”

Charlie pursed her lips, then looked at Dean sadly. “That won’t be a problem,” she said, “because I understand why you _think _they are but, really, Dean, they’re just really well programmed code. Of course you wouldn’t have the experience to be able to tell the difference but trust me...”

”Cut out the patronising bullshit,” Dean interrupted impatiently. “Fine, you don’t believe me. I don’t care. Come inside Moondoor with me and speak to Loki for yourself. Well, at least speak to me when Loki can answer and ask him stuff I can’t possibly know the answer to.”

”What ‘stuff’?”

”I dunno. He’s a computer. You’re computer-girl. YOU figure it out.”

”Computer girl?” Charlie repeated incredulously. “Anyway, how am I supposed to get inside the program? I’ve got an avatar, but no rig.”

”Ash will be able to put something together,” Dean said, confidently. “Let’s go see him. Just, well, be careful about mentioning the alive thing.”

”That I don’t believe is true anyway,” she reminded him.

Dean just shook his head and grinned wryly, “You will,” he said, with such quiet confidence that Charlie briefly doubted her own conviction that he _had_ to be wrong. “I can understand you not wanting to, Charlie, but wishing don’t change nothing.”

Despite the fact it was Sunday, the one day of the week when ‘Lil Beanz was closed (as opposed to the days when it was merely practically deserted) Dean led the way to the coffee shop in search of Ash and, as he expected, his friend was inside. As always.

While Ash made them all coffee (not instant this time) Dean and Charlie filled him in with the latest developments.

”Sure, I can fit you up,” he told Charlie. “Probably better than myself, to be honest. I’ve got gloves and boots. Don’t know if I’ve got a body suit that will fit you but I’ve definitely got one of those Samsung virtual hoods. Only used it once and it made me chuck my cookies so I stopped using it. Too damned real for comfort, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t think my laptop has the processing power to use it,” Charlie admitted. “Those bastards took my Gaming PC when they stole my rig.”

Ash shrugged. “I’ve computers up the wazoo,” he said. “Setting you up won’t be a problem.”

”But where?” Dean asked pointedly. “There’s no room in my apartment and she’s not going to fit in your stock cupboard with you.”

Ash blinked at him in bemusement. “Are you smoking crack or something? Charlie clearly needs somewhere to stay, anyway, so she can move into my place and we’ll set up her gear there.”

”Your place?” Dean asked, completely confused.

“My apartment,” Ash said, slowly as though talking to an idiot. “You know... the place where I live...”

”I thought you lived _here,” _Dean blurted. “You’re _always _here.”

“Because I live here,” Ash said, now equally confused.

”Okay, time out you idiots,” Charlie said, as Dean and Ash just blinked at each other uncertainly. “Ash, where exactly is your apartment?”

”Upstairs,” he said. “Of course.”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck, flushing with embarrassment, why the hell hadn’t he figured that out himself? Then his eyes widened. “Hang on, that’s bullshit. That’s Frank’s place.”

”Who is Frank?” Charlie asked.

”The owner of this place,” Dean said. “My old boss. Never comes downstairs ‘cos he’s got dodgy knees or something.”

It was Ash’s turn to look embarrassed. “Um, about that,” he said. “There IS no Frank,” he confessed.

”Sure there is,” Dean argued. “Big guy. Bald. Bad knees. He interviewed me when I first got the job.”

”He was just a guy I paid to play the role,” Ash admitted guiltily. “I knew you’d never accept a pay check off me, man, so I...um...made up Frank. That’s why you never saw him again.” 

”So no bad knees?”

”No bad knees.”

”You fucker.”

”I know,” Ash agreed.

”I worried about his fucking knees.”

”So this is your place?” Charlie interrupted hurriedly.

”Yup,” Ash said.

”I can’t believe you lied about Frank’s knees.”

“There is no Frank,” Ash pointed out.

”Jesus, you two, can we get past the Frank thing already,” Charlie asked, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

”You lied to me, man,” Dean muttered.

”Only with the best intentions.”

”Road to hell,” Dean pointed out, but he was struggling to maintain his righteous anger and Ash knew it.

”Knew you were too damned proud to take the job from me directly.”

”Having pride isn’t a bad thing,” Dean said, defensively.

”Oh yeah? Tell that to your black eye,” Ash said, looking pointedly between Dean’s face and Charlie’s swollen hand.

“He’s got a point,” Charlie agreed. “So, are we doing this?”

”Seems to me we’ve got no choice,“ Ash said, with uncharacteristic seriousness. “Priorities. Whatever the fuck else is going on here, we need to somehow get Dean into a position where he can gank this Darkness bitch. And we need to do it quickly, before people start dying for real.”


	26. The Gathering Hoarde

Victor had been playing Moondoor for the entire fifteen years it had been accessible to the public. 

He’d been introduced to the game during his time at the Academy by his friend, Aaron, and the two had played ever since. Not together though. Well, not since 1998 anyway, when Aaron had risen to become the Guildmaster of his own Guild and had left Victor behind.

But then again, that was the story of his and Aaron’s relationship anyway.

Victor had spent his professional life just slowly plodding along, putting in the hours, grinding away with dogged persistence until he had reached his current position. Head of his own Regional Office. His career path had been respectable, predictable and unimpressive.

Aaron’s star, on the other hand, had risen so high as a profiler that he was now a Supervisory Special Agent, the Unit Chief of Quantico’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, no less.

Victor resented that a bit.

Not as much as he resented the fact he’d never received an invitation to join Aaron’s Guild, The Dogs of War, and had instead been left behind in The Gathering Horde.

He did understand _why. _Aaron had formed his Guild out of the best of the best, inviting membership to only the highest level players he could entice until DoW had become one of the top five Moondoor Guilds. And in Moondoor, as in real life, Victor was, at best, a solid but unexceptional player.

Fifteen years in, Victor had still only achieved a character level of 42.

Not that level 42 was anything to be sniffed at. Victor was still in the top 10% of player rankings, sitting at the respectable position of 582nd place in a game that had over a quarter of a million live accounts. More than 60,000 people in the world were playing at any given moment in time. Probably double that at the weekends, and so for Victor, whose playing hours were limited to just a couple of hours most evenings and occasional full days on Sunday, he didn’t think he was doing too badly.

Besides, he held a Rank 8 position in his guild and that was a source of serious pride to him.

Guild ranks were, in Victor’s opinion, far more important than character level or playing position. He was only a mid-level player in TGH, character-wise, but as Rank 8 he was more powerful than anyone except the Guild Mistress and her Rank 9 War Lords.

Ironically, as a Rank 8 he was, effectively, the Guild’s law enforcer. It was a large part of his role to monitor the Noobs and ensure they followed the Guild rules and didn’t step on the toes of other players. Particularly high-level players in other Guilds who might use the infraction as an excuse to declare a Guild War.

The Guild Rules themselves were very much a human construct. It was the players, not the game, who had cobbled up a series of so-called ‘rules’ for players. Rules such as not physically attacking other players without provocation if they were unarmed and just out collecting resources. Rules like that were just social niceties. Breaking a rule, therefore, was not likely to gain you any in-game penalties. It was, however, highly likely to get you thrown out of a Guild for causing unnecessary conflict. 

The problem with Noobs was that they caused conflicts to develop that they didn’t have the ability to fight themselves, then they went running to the Guild expecting higher level players to fight on their behalf. High Level players resented the fuck out of newbie players who expected them to risk themselves because of acts of sheer stupidity. Getting killed in-game imposed a number of debilitating debuffs on a character which was inconvenient enough at the best of times. Getting killed because of someone else’s idiocy, however, was infuriating.

On the other hand, a Guild’s survival depended on its ability to create loyalty within its membership. Members were encouraged to feel like ‘family’, rather than cannon-fodder (Although, in the case of many newbies, that was what they truly were to the Guild) and so Victor’s role was not simply that of enforcer but also one of _mentor_.

Sometimes, Victor relished that role. There was nothing quite as satisfying as helping a new player gain their feet in the game. Aiding low level players, regaling them with his years of experience, sometimes felt truly rewarding.

Sometimes, it sucked donkeys.

Just as in Real Life, some people were just, well, too stupid to live.

Unfortunately, again as in his Real Life, Victor was obliged to help them anyway.

One of the benefits of his Rank 8 position was an actual in-game benefit. Victor’s Realm Map offered the feature of enabling him to see the physical location of every guild member. Additionally, as an R8, he had access to Guild Ports. Instead of having to use one of his highly valuable Realm Ports to aid the other members, an R8 could teleport to the side of any player in distress for a set period before the time-out transported the R8 back to their point of origin.

The Guild Ports ranged in timescale between 15 minutes and 4 hours.

Victor rarely used more than a 15 minute one. That was about as much conversation as he could handle with the majority of the noobs.

Honestly, though, it wasn’t the _Noobs_ who got on his nerves as much as the _Farmers_.

‘Farmers’ were the Moondoor players who never, ever, seemed to understand that the game was about winning Guild Wars, not running around with flowers in their hair playing dress-up. Farmers just pranced around Moondoor, collecting resources, cluttering Guild Chats with inane chatter about what was happening in their Real Lives, and whining like little bitches if anybody ever attacked them in-game. Complaining that higher level players were being ‘bullies’ for ‘picking on them’ despite the fact they point-blank refused to spend any effort, or even any real life money, to level up themselves. Failing to understand that the higher-level players had earned, or paid for, the right to attack lower level characters and**_ that_**, like it or not, was the goddamned game they were playing and if they didn’t like it they should all go play something like the Sims instead.

And they all, without exception, called themselves stupid names.

Like John the Mighty, Killer King, Princess Precious or FaerieQueen.

(Victor definitely wouldn’t have approved of the moniker ‘Dean the Righteous’)

And it just so happened that it was a stupid girl calling herself Queen Gold who was the current source of Victor’s annoyance.

For the fourth time in a week, Queen Gold was demanding R8 assistance.

Sunday was Victor’s only uninterrupted game time. He’d been looking forward to joining a skirmish the Guild had set against some Rock Ogres and hopefully gaining some valuable XP towards the distant horizon of his eventual next level up. He was in the War Party queue, letting other players know he was intending to join, but he was still in the process of changing into his battle-gear, swapping his equipment out to achieve optimum success against the targets, when his realm map bleeped with an incoming alert.

Queen Gold had, apparently, gotten herself into trouble again.

Victor was briefly tempted to simply ignore her. Once he joined the War Party, the messages from guild members not taking part in the raid would be cut-off for the duration of the battle. If he pressed ‘Join’ straight away, no one would ever know he had even seen the distress beacon let alone chosen to ignore it.

But, Victor sighed, it just wasn’t in his nature to do something like that.

So, resentfully, he withdrew from the War Party queue and teleported towards the distress call instead.

He materialised, not unexpectedly, in a field full of flowers. Queen Gold was the kind of player who wasted hours fulfilling nothing except virtually pointless low-level Quests such as ‘Gather a bushel of lavender’ and then complained that after three years of game-play she had still only reached character level 14.

Still… “That’s different,” he said, as he looked towards the end of the meadow where the hedgerow surrounding the field had been bisected by a swirling circle of shimmering black. The circle was perhaps five feet in diameter and, although it was visibly pulsing, it didn’t appear to be either moving or expanding.

More peculiarly, the object, whatever it was, wasn’t registering on his system interface at all.

“…so, I’m thinking it’s obviously a portal to somewhere, but I don’t know where and so I don’t know whether its somewhere I want to go, so I thought maybe you’d go through it and let me know if it was safe, you know, because you’ve got tons of ports and I don’t, so it makes sense, doesn’t it? But, obviously, if it’s a portal to something cool, like a treasure or something, I just want to make it clear I’ve got dibs on it, obviously, since I’m the one who found it,” Queen Gold said, in one breath, then smiled at him expectantly.

“You want me to go through the port, find out if it leads to a treasure, and let you know?” Victor repeated incredulously. “That’s your definition of what constitutes the reason for making a ‘distress’ call to an R8?”

“Well, duh,” she said, placing her hands on her hips and frowning at him. “I’ve only got a couple of Realm Ports and I don’t want to waste them ending up somewhere I don’t want to be.”

Victor counted to five under his breath, then said, “Realm Ports are available for purchase in the Guild Store.”

“I don’t have any game credits.”

“Buy some.”

“Oh, pooh,” Queen Gold exclaimed. “Pay day isn’t until next week and anyway, I don’t spend money on this game if I can help it. It’s a complete money-pit. I think people who pay-to-play have more money than sense.”

“But you want me to use one of _my_ Realm Ports,” Victor pointed out.

She shrugged carelessly. “You’ve got tons of them, haven’t you?”

“Because I _bought_ them.”

“I don’t see why you need to be mean about it,” she said. “I can just put a request out on Guild Chat and someone will give me one eventually. They always do. But I don’t want to take the chance of losing the treasure.”

“If there’s a treasure.”

“It’s a port. Of course it’s leading to a treasure.”

“Or a monster,” Victor pointed out.

“Which is exactly why YOU ought to go through first,” she said, with a triumphant smirk.

And THAT, Victor decided, was why he hated Noobs and Farmers.

“I’m noting this ‘distress call’ as a Guild infraction. Your _fourth_ this week,” he told her sternly. “And if I find you posting a message on Guild Chat begging for ports or _anything_ else, I will make a strong suggestion to the Guild Mistress that your Guild Membership should be revoked. It’s about time you started to pull your weight in the Guild instead of constantly freeloading.”

“You suck,” she announced, her face contorting with fury. “You’re just a mean old man. I bet you only play this game because everyone hates you in real life. If I get stuck somewhere, I’ll put in a distress call and then it will be a real one and you’ll have to come help me anyway, or it will be YOU getting into trouble, so there.” She stuck her tongue out at him defiantly, then flounced towards the black portal and dove into it without a backwards glance.

As soon as she passed through it, the portal blinked out of existence.

“Stupid little bitch,” Victor muttered, glancing at his Realm Map to see where in Moondoor she’d ended up. He was rather hoping it was somewhere freezing cold, like Arcturia, or maybe the idea of her landing in the middle of one of the Great Lakes of Fendir would be more satisfying.

Oddly, though, her icon didn’t reappear anywhere on his map.

She had completely disappeared.

As though the weird portal had just eaten her up and thrown her out of the game entirely.

“Good riddance,” he muttered. “I hope the damned thing killed you.”

The idea of her suffering a few days of the death debuff when she returned to the game was less satisfying than the idea of her having to actually swim out of a lake, but Victor still felt rather pleased with the outcome.

Especially when he checked his interface and saw he still had time to join the War Party. 


	27. In like Flynn

Jimmy hadn’t set a fixed time to meet Dean in-game on Sunday, primarily because he wasn’t exactly sure how the trial was going to work yet. Nobody at the clinic had made it clear to him on Friday whether he’d be receiving ‘treatments’ every day or whether the rigs would be available for the use of the patients regardless of whether an actual treatment was taking place.

The game time so far had, truthfully, just been offered to keep people occupied whilst the patients arrived at the facility at staggered times of the day. So it wasn’t until Sunday morning that he and the other patients received their formal Induction Meeting and the full details of the proposed clinical trial were explained to them.

And, as Jimmy had already suspected might be the case, when the ‘full’ explanation came it was vague, unsatisfying and scientifically improbable.

They had been ‘randomly selected’ to participate in the trial. They would be receiving free doses of a new drug as part of a pharmaceutical company’s efforts to gain an FDA license for its use, so that it could later be released for sale. The name of the company and even the drug itself were declared ‘top secret’. Jimmy couldn’t even get the clinic to tell him whether the drug was purportedly supposed to be a cure or merely designed to extend life expectancy.

The drug was too potent to be injected or ingested. It could only be taken in vitro. This, apparently, explained the use of the immersion rigs. The drug would be introduced into the bio-gel that suspended and sustained a body when immersed. It would therefore enter the body via gradual osmosis during the time the patient remained within the tank. Jimmy found the science of that part of the explanation to be highly suspect but none of the other patients questioned it. The provision of the game, Moondoor, they were told, was an irrelevance. It was merely intended to provide a form of entertainment for the patients whilst they were inside the rigs.

No other game was available as a distraction (Jimmy asked, just to be awkward) but that, he was told, was simply because the immersion tanks themselves had been ‘generously’ donated to the clinic by RRE and so, naturally, that company had kindly pre-programmed the rigs with their own most popular game.

None of the patients had vocalised any dissatisfaction with the idea of being ‘forced’ to play Moondoor and, not unexpectedly, through careful conversations with them after the meeting, Jimmy soon established that each and every one of the patients in the clinical trial already was an avid player of the game anyway.

Which, statistically, made no sense.

With over 20,000 new cases of AML getting diagnosed each year in the US alone, even allowing for patients dying or being cured, there had to be tens of thousands of potential candidates for the trial. But worldwide, Moondoor only had about 250,000 players of which far less than half could be considered ‘avid’, and although RRE was based in America, a great many of its player-base were located in places such as Japan and Europe.

So whilst statistics lied, it was patently obvious that it was highly unlikely that ten people chosen _at random _for a clinical trial would share the characteristics of being both AML sufferers _and _avid Moondoor gamers. Which only went to confirm Jimmy’s earlier suspicion that the whole setup was smoke and mirrors.

The good news, though, was that the clinic was actively encouraging the patients to spend as much time in the immersion rigs as possible.

Again, that struck Jimmy as evidence the drug was only a placebo since any _real_ drug dosage would surely require strict monitoring and control. There was absolutely no scenario on which it could possibly make sense for patients to be able to choose their own dosage.

But he didn’t care.

He was free to spend the next six weeks or so, playing in Moondoor to his heart’s content and, really, that was the best possible outcome he could have hoped for.

But, despite that decision, Jimmy wasn’t naturally impetuous. Truth was, he’d never felt the urge to do anything that could be considered impetuous, by any definition, in his life before. So it wasn’t a case of him second-guessing his decision when he found himself unable to resist the urge to question his fellow patients a little more on their own participation. It was simply that although he’d unexpectedly found himself wanting to leap into the unknown, he still couldn’t do so with his eyes closed. And his faulty in-game interface was still bothering him.

So Jimmy found himself simultaneously acting both in and out of character. He broke every former rule of his usual self-imposed reticence by approaching the other patients and initiating conversation.

Disregarding his blushing, stammering embarrassment, the primary outcome of those conversations was the discovery that he was the only person who had experienced a ‘glitch’ when using the Gen 9 immersion rig. He was, however, the only person in the trial who was using a bespoke avatar rather than a generic one. That at least made sense since he doubted they’d had access to the finances to procure one.

So whatever was wrong with his interface, its direct causation was not necessarily the new equipment in itself but presumably a simple incompatibility of the rig’s interface with his bespoke avatar.

As he had already suspected was the case.

And if the flaw was a fundamental incompatibility between two technologies, given the limitation of the timescale involved, his only option other than simply putting up with it would be to swap out his bespoke avatar for a normal generic one.

There was no reason whatsoever why he couldn’t simply play the game with a different avatar. And doing so would presumably return his ability to use functions such as his Realm Ports. He’d be able to move around Moondoor at will, instead of having to travel around the old-fashioned way. Without ports, all of his gaming would be limited to whatever locations he could physically walk or ride to from the Roadhouse where his character was currently located and that seemed like a ridiculous restriction to accept.

Except, he’d be travelling with Dean The Righteous, of course.

And that was probably the crux of it, wasn’t it?

He was going to be spending his time with Dean and, oddly enough, that idea seemed like a more than satisfying way to spend the last few weeks of his life. But he wanted to do so as himself. Well, a _himself_ that didn’t look like an escapee from a George Romero movie, at least. 

It felt really important to him, somehow, to stay within his own avatar, however glitchy, instead of wearing a different, alien face.

He wanted, _needed,_ to be himself in front of Dean.

Jimmy knew this probably meant he was crushing on the guy, which was pretty embarrassing.

Worse than that, he was possibly crushing on an _avatar_ and the person he was perceiving as ‘Dean’ didn’t truly exist at all.

But, really, did it matter anyway?

“He’s real to _me_,” he decided. “And that’s good enough.”

…

They materialized outside of the Roadhouse and Charlie revealed the avatar she had purchased on her flight.

"It's...um...nice," Dean said, unconvincingly.

"At least you still have red hair," Ash pointed out. "Could be worse."

“A lot of hair,” Dean said. “Flowy hair. Pretty, but not very practical for fighting. But I guess you could tie it back or plait it.”

“Or chop it off,” Ash suggested. “Probably safer to just cut it, really.”

"It's still going to be orange," Charlie grumbled.

"Titian," Ash lied kindly. "It only looks orange because you're wearing green. Kind of clashes."

Charlie gave him a scathing look. "I _know_ it clashes. It's this stupid Huntress costume that came with this avatar. I look like I've escaped from Robin Hood."

The two men studied her green costume solemnly and decided she was being overly optimistic with her comparison. Although the style _was_ very much like the design of Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood outfit, because the digital artist had used a far too vivid color palate, it was less ‘Prince of Thieves’ than Will Ferrell in ‘Elf’.

“Maybe lose the hat,” Ash suggested.

"It's kind of more an elf look," Dean mused. "But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you had pointy ears like Ash you two could definitely rock the Elven theme together."

Ash pulled his lips back in a grimace. "She's too short. If she had pointy ears she'd look even _more_ like one of Santa's helpers."

"Don't you have anything else to wear in your inventory?" Dean asked.

"Don't _you? _" Charlie asked pointedly. "Bow legs don't look good in a skirt."

"It's not a fucking skirt," Dean growled.

"Look, why don't you both just swap clothes?" Ash suggested. "Charlie would make a cool warrior princess and you've got the height and colouring to make that Hunter costume look good."

"I'm not wearing tights," Dean spat. The lower part of the Hunter costume definitely looked more like leggings than pants to him and he wasn’t sure the front of the tunic was quite low enough to fully cover his crotch. Since the designer of his avatar hadn't skimped on Dean's...um...proportions.. that could prove somewhat of an issue.

"Why not? You don't seem to mind wearing a skirt?" Charlie said, her eyes glinting hungrily as she visualized herself in Dean's outfit. "I could definitely rock the Xena look and your long legs would look a hell of a lot better in these pants than mine do."

"You've got the butt for tight pants," Ash told Dean supportively, then flushed and said, "No homo. Just sayin'."

"Oh, come on, Dean," Charlie wheedled. "You hate your outfit anyway. Let's swap and then at least _one_ of us will be happy."

Dean sighed and gave in. She had a point. Besides, the pants would at least protect his inner thighs from Baby's scales. Considering the vast height difference between their two avatars, it was fortunate clothes always emerged from a player’s inventory in the appropriate size. Charlie's diminutive outfit would miraculously resize itself to Dean's frame as soon as he took ownership of it.

"Why did you buy such a tiny avatar?" he asked, as they exchanged items of clothing. "I swear you can't be more than five foot high. I mean you're cute and all," he added hurriedly, "But still... I mean, I hated playing a goblin because being short can be a real ball-ache sometimes in this game."

"I had a limited pool of options available for purchase. Besides, there isn't a lot of choice with generic female fighting characters anyway," Charlie admitted. "Not a lot of call for them from players. Most female players who want to be taken seriously as fighters choose to play as male avatars."

"Really?" Dean asked, rethinking a lot of his previous interactions in the game. "I don't see how it makes any difference what sex your avatar is. It doesn't affect your actual power or skill levels."

"Playing a male is the only way to avoid all the sexist crap from other gamers," Charlie explained. "Plus it avoids the in-game pervs who get their kicks sexting private messages to female players."

“So why didn’t _you_ choose a male avatar?” Dean asked, reasonably.

Charlie shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe it’s a girl-power thing. I refuse to let my own choices be dictated by other players’ predjudices, I guess. Plus, when anyone sends me an inappropriate sext I make sure they regret it.” She grinned nastily and Dean was pretty sure that meant she didn’t just simply report the inappropriate behaviour to the game mods. “Besides,” she added. “Ash was right. Looking at your butt in those pants, I don’t think it’s _me_ who needs to worry about getting perved on.”

“Actually, I’m not sure it’s his _butt_ they’ll be looking at,” Ash pointed out.

“Great,” Dean muttered, flushing as he yanked at the doublet in a vain attempt to pull it lower down his crotch. “I knew this thing was going to be too short.”

“Just say you’re going for an authentic Errol Flynn look,” Charlie suggested.

“Who?” Dean asked, with a shrug of total confusion.

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Charlie sighed. “Never mind. Just accept it as a compliment and let’s move on. Time’s a wasting. We’re here to get a Quest off this Ellen and meet up with this ‘Jimmy’ friend of yours, right?”

“Well, if he’s even here,” Dean agreed. “Don’t know if he really meant it about being here today. If he is, don’t mention anything to him about the boss stuff though. I hardly know the guy, really, so let’s keep the details to ourselves for now. The story is just we need to get me levelled up, so we’re ganking all the monsters we can find. Hopefully, he’ll want to just tag along anyway.”

“You sure you want to include him at all?” Charlie asked. “You’ve got me and Ash to help you now. Why not just stick to the three of us? Why are you so keen to have him join us?”

“He’s a level 64 player,” Dean replied steadily, hoping the blood rushing to his cheeks wasn’t obvious. “It would be stupid to ignore that kind of asset. That’s all.”

“Hmmmm,” Charlie said doubtfully. “Is that a blush, Dean? Is there something you aren’t telling us?”

“Shut up,” Dean mumbled grumpily, entering the Roadhouse in an ill-tempered stomp.

Charlie turned to Ash with a delighted smirk. “Oooh, I can see the signs. I touched a nerve. I think Dean’s sweet on this Jimmy,” she said, with a wink, then she grabbed Ash’s arm and dragged him inside.

She was impressed by the detailed interior. Although the bar had a rough and rustic vibe, the programmer in her was delighted by all the authentic touches that had been painstakingly added by whoever had written the code that formed the Roadhouse environ. Even despite the limitations of the VR rig Ash had put together for her, stepping inside the Roadhouse genuinely felt like walking into a real life bar.

The sights, sounds and smells were fully authentic. So much so that her Avatar’s mouth literally salivated at the sight of a couple of players eating Hot Wings near the bar area.

She looked closely at the dark-haired woman behind the bar. It had to be Ellen, because Dean had already described her appearance in detail, but even to Charlie’s expert eye (not to mention her system interface which was quickly offering her meta data details of her surroundings) there was nothing about the woman to confirm Dean’s assertion she was an NPC rather than a player.

Ellen read, on Charlie’s console, as being a player character 28. A _player_ character.

Yet Dean had insisted she was an NPC.

The same Dean who also insisted the NPC’s in Moondoor were alive, she reminded herself. Briefly, and not for the first time, Charlie considered the very real possibility that Dean was simply completely insane.

Occam’s Razor, however, suggested the most probable explanation was that _one of them_ had a faulty system interface. And Charlie had insufficient information to make a definitive judgement of which one of them it was. So she decided to hold her tongue, bide her time and collect more information.

Dean was already at the bar, ordering drinks.

_Three _drinks, which probably explained his despondent posture.

It appeared his new friend ‘Jimmy’ wasn’t waiting for them after all.

Ash had paused to speak with one of the players eating the hot wings. Someone named Gordon, apparently. So Charlie picked a table and sat down to wait for both of them. As she waited, she ran a fingertip gently over the rough oak of the table. 70% she decided. Possibly 75%. That was approximately how genuinely real the sensation of touching the table felt to her.

An unfamiliar bitterness filled her stomach and she felt a prickle of tears as the enormity of losing her immersion tank struck her yet again. Then she shook herself angrily. She didn’t have time to feel sorry for herself. If Dean was right (if he wasn’t just _insane_, an unwelcome voice whispered in her head) then real lives were at stake here.

So she blinked away the unwanted tears and looked up just in time to see a new, unfamiliar player enter the bar and cross the room towards Dean with a hesitant, somewhat awkward smile on his indisputably handsome face.

‘Jimmy’, she assumed, as she saw Dean notice the newcomer and freeze like a rabbit in headlights. (But she moved her hand to the hilt of her sword anyway, just in case).

“I’m…um…sorry I’m late,” Jimmy said, his voice surprisingly deep. “I logged in as soon as I…” Then he paused and hesitated, looking increasingly uncertain as Dean just continued to stare at him silently. “I… um… I’m not good at this kind of thing. When you said ‘see you, tomorrow’ was that just a social nicety? Did I misunderstand your intention?”

He took a step backwards, his shoulders dropping in clear disappointment, but then Dean broke free of his momentary paralysis. “No, jeez, sorry man,” he blurted. “Don’t go. You just…um… surprised me.”

Jimmy cocked his head in confusion. “So we didn’t agree to meet?”

“We didn’t?” Dean asked, now looking equally confused.

Charlie face-palmed.

It took a few more excruciatingly embarrassing (at least for the watching Charlie) minutes before a grinning Dean finally managed to convince Jimmy he was genuinely welcome and then brought him and _four_ beers to her table.

“This is Charlie,” he told Jimmy. “And that’s Ash,” he waved to where the High Elf was standing. “This is Jimmy.”

“Hi, Jimmy,” she said, smiling cautiously at the level 64 player.

“Hello,” he said. Then he frowned at her, his expression confused. “You’re wearing Dean’s clothes.”

She blinked at his blunt comment, but “They suit me more,” she announced, with a smirk. “I’m rocking the Xena look because I’m definitely the prettier princess.”

“I am uncertain whether that is completely true,” Jimmy replied thoughtfully, seemingly completely unaware he might offend either her or Dean by saying so. “I wasn’t aware his outfit was intended to portray a specific _costume_ but, with that understanding, I would say that Dean portrayed a most convincing and aesthetically pleasing ‘princess’.”

Charlie, fortunately, thought his comment was hilarious. Dean, perhaps, not so much.

Then Jimmy turned to regard Dean in his hunter outfit. “I do, however, also applaud your decision to emulate Errol Flynn today instead.”


	28. Game theory

Nigel Roman’s stomach rumbled loudly. 

He was already several hours late for his Sunday lunch (he didn’t even want to imagine the inevitable disapproving look on Henrietta’s face over his absence) and he still could see no way to escape the pit of hell he was trapped in.

He shuffled loudly in his chair, his lower back and knees angrily protesting the movement after the length of time he’d been sitting in rigid, panicked concentration.

The thing was, as much as it made him almost physically sick to admit it to himself, he didn’t think there was any possible solution. He was boxed in from all sides and the consequences of a series of previous bad decisions had seemingly led him into an unsolvable conundrum.

Across the desk, the Auditor completely ignored his distress.

The small, fussy, incredibly irritating bastard just kept typing numbers calmly into his keyboard, his expression one of satisfied smugness. The more agitated Nigel became, the more the Auditor appeared to be relishing his suffering.

Nigel frowned and renewed his determination to find a way to beat the little fucker at his own game.

…

If it could be said there was any such thing as a _typical_ gamer, Jim Murphy definitely wouldn’t have fit the bill.

Jim lived a quiet uneventful life in Blue Earth, Minnesota. His friends and neighbours, if asked to describe him, would have said he was a gentle, generous, sympathetic man who spent the majority of his waking life doing good works and offering even the most ardent of sinners a shoulder to cry on or a strong back to lean on.

Jim, better known to his parishioners as _Pastor_ Jim, was a pillar of his community and a friend to all. He lived in a tiny modest house, adjacent to a tiny equally modest church, and he didn’t even own a television set, let alone modern conveniences such as air conditioning or a power shower.

Which was why it was always a constant source of bemusement to Hannah Carson, the lady who dealt with the parish bookkeeping, that Pastor Jim’s electricity bill was always so excessive.

She’d even mentioned it a few times to her husband, the local sheriff, and he had eventually made a half-hearted investigation into the matter. Although he never did find an answer to the oddity, he told his wife the most likely scenario was that someone had hacked into the church’s power supply to conceal a grow-farm hidden somewhere near the parish grounds.

Since Sheriff Carson had a personal somewhat liberal attitude towards weed anyway, having been an enthusiastic child of the sixties himself, he didn’t lose much sleep over the matter.

So deep inside the basement of the otherwise unremarkable church, Pastor Jim remained free to follow his normal practice of spending the hours between his Morning and Evening Sunday services, roaming the realm of Moondoor as his level 36 alter ego, ‘KillerSaint’.

…

“This is fun,” Jimmy blurted, grinning widely as he swiped his sword sideways to decapitate another flying Gremloid, causing another arterial stream of lime-green blood to spurt towards the high ceiling of the dimly lit cave. The viscous liquid splattered against the stone, then began to drip downwards, joining the rest of the acid-colored rain that was dribbling over them.

“Fun, but fucking messy,” Dean griped, but his grin was as wide as Jimmy’s.

“Incoming,” Ash yelled, as he cast another disturbance spell into one of the many side tunnels where another nest of Gremloids was sleeping; waking them up and sending them flying in a mass of fangy fury towards the mouth of the cave where Dean, Jimmy and Charlie were waiting to dispatch them.

The Gremloids were similar to cat-sized vampire bats. They had sharp fangs and nasty-looking claws but weren’t particularly difficult to handle in groups of just a dozen or so at a time so it was particularly fortuitous that instead of gathering in one huge pulsing mass to sleep, they seemed to congregate in family groups. It meant that Ash was able to work his way through the cave system, waking them in individual manageable waves.

But only, apparently, because it was still daylight. According to Ellen, the moment the sun went down the Gremloids woke en mass and then flew out like a wave of dark death, decimating anything in their path with the mindless ferocity of piranhas.

Individually, though, they were no match against a swift blade.

Naturally, that also meant in game-terms they weren’t worth much XP. Even the largest was only offering 8 and the majority of them only a lowly 5. Still, that added up pretty quickly when you multiplied it by hundreds.

Their original plan was for Dean to deal the killing blow on all of the Gremloids, whilst the others just corralled them in his direction. But when they realised just how many of the creatures needed to be despatched before nightfall, it had become pretty much a free for all. Charlie was benefiting from the XP, at least. She was already half way towards level 25 and they had only been despatching Gremloids for a couple of hours. Jimmy and Ash’s XP bars had barely moved at all. Past level 50, the amount of XP required for a level up ran into the tens of thousands.

Dean, however, was working towards his third level up since the beginning of the slaughter. He was easily going to hit level 11 before they ran out of victims.

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” Charlie crowed, as she stabbed two Gremloids simultaneously with one strike of her blade.

“We aren’t shooting them,” Jimmy muttered to Dean, in a worried aside. “_Should_ we be shooting them?”

“It’s just a figure of speech,” Dean advised him patiently, although he was becoming increasingly tempted to demand Jimmy gave him the phone number of his parents so that Dean could call them up and give them a serious lecture on how home schooling someone clearly didn’t work if the tutors failed to even teach the rudiments of actual, everyday conversation. The more he interacted with Jimmy, the more he became convinced that the poor guy had absolutely no experience of basic day-to-day interactions whatsoever.

The oddest thing was that instead of finding Jimmy’s ignorance frustrating, Dean was getting fonder of him with each conversational mis-step. Maybe, honestly, because it helped his own confidence. Jimmy was obviously intellectually intelligent, was clearly loaded (given he had a bespoke avatar and the same equipment as Dean but had presumably actually purchased it) and was hot as hell. If it hadn’t been for Jimmy’s social awkwardness, Dean wasn’t sure he’d have had the confidence to keep conversing with him.

“The word is flirting,” Loki insisted. “Just admit you fancy the guy and we can move on.”

“I’m not flirting,” Dean insisted. “I’m just being friendly.”

“Yeah, sure,” Loki mocked. “Ooh, three incoming on your left, slugger.”

Dean swung his sword and sliced two in half. He only took a wing off the third but it crashed to the floor and he stomped down on it hard, crushing its skull with his heel. At least the leather boots of the hunter outfit he was wearing were proving more useful than the rest of it.

“If you were wearing the hat, you’d get a set bonus,” Loki pointed out archly. “You’re missing out on 10% overall HP.”

“I don’t care,” Dean replied firmly. A man had to draw a line somewhere and, it turned out, _his_ line had proven to be wearing a stupid jaunty hat with a feather stuck in it.

…

The Auditor hummed under his breath as his spreadsheet filled with line after line of ordered figures.

He loved the purity of numbers.

Numbers didn’t lie.

_People_ lied. People even used numbers to lie for them. But the numbers themselves were pure and incorruptible. Each number belonged in its own perfect place and the skill was in finding the numbers that were out of place (perhaps due to genuine mistakes, more likely due to deliberate mishandling) and moving them to where they truly belonged until his journal balanced perfectly and the fuzzy blurred edges of the story changed to the sharp crystal clear lines of perfect clarity.

Numbers made sense to him.

People, not so much.

With figures, he could ascertain what was an asset and what was a liability, what numbers belonged within the balance sheet and which fell under profit and loss.

Such as the account he was currently processing. The air fare, hotel costs, cab fares and sustenance charges all fell squarely under expenses, directly affecting the bottom line of net profit. Nice and straightforward.

More problematic, of course, was exactly where in his ledger the figures belonged. Should he file under costs of asset acquisition or did the expenses belong purely under liability?

The question mark wasn’t over the numbers themselves.

It was the human factor that always gave him pause.

Should Ruby Cortese be considered an asset or a liability?

The Auditor wasn’t sure yet.

The answer probably hinged on what Sam Winchester did next.

But, the Auditor thought, as Nigel Roman finally reached over the desk, his face set with angry determination as he finally made his move, people were infinitely predictable.

It was easy, on the whole, to anticipate the direction in which they would leap. Easy to herd them, like sheep through a shearing chute, in the direction the Auditor required. Easy to cut off their options until only one obvious path remained open. The path he needed them to take.

So the Auditor paused in his steady inputting of figures, meeting Nigel’s eyes for a moment, enjoying the man’s momentary expression of cautious triumph.

Predictable.

Then cruelly dashing Nigel’s momentary sense of accomplishment as he lifted one elegant finger against a piece of carved ivory, then pressed enough to move it a single, solitary, but totally devastating inch.

Watching Nigel’s face fall into crushed defeat.

“Checkmate,” the Auditor said.

…

KillerSaint was not only a respectable character level 36, which made him one of the highest level players in his guild (If only because said Guild, the Hunters, was one of the lesser ones, and so attracted very few of the highest level players into its ranks), he was also the proud holder of a rank 9 designation.

As an R9, his icon on the Moondoor realm map displayed the addition of a small symbol indicating he was formally a ‘War Lord’.

Which would have both amused and surprised any of Pastor Jim’s real life acquaintances.

They probably would have been equally confused by his physical appearance in the game.

KillerSaint had chosen a largely innocuous avatar with a grisly grey beard, a tall slim body and a weather-beaten wrinkled face. His avatar was dressed in a large dark overcoat, wore a black moleskin cowboy hat and was equipped with twin Colt pistols in a shell-filled double tooled holster, a confederate sword and a hunting knife.

To the uninitiated, KillerSaint looked like any generic gunslinger from an old cowboy movie.

To any fan of DC comics, he was an absolute ringer for the Saint of Killers; the almost omnipotent nemesis character out of ‘Preacher’.

Never let it be said that Pastor Jim didn’t have a healthy sense of humor.

Which was just as well, since his Guild Master, Bobby Singer, was frequently a cantankerous old goat who seemed to delight in tasking him with some seriously nonsensical quests.

Such as the one he’d been tasked with today.

A couple of newbie players had sent in a Guild distress call earlier that afternoon. One of the Guild’s R8’s, Gordon, had grumpily ported to help them out (and probably tear them a new one, since Gordon wasn’t known for being a nice guy) but Gordon had never reported back afterwards and all three player icons were now completely missing from the Guild Map.

Which meant, as Jim had patiently pointed out, that they had all simply logged out of the game without remembering to let the R10 know what had happened.

Bobby, though, had declared he’d had a ‘bad feeling’ about the situation.

By which Jim concluded the Guild Master was pretty sure Gordon had lost patience with the noobs and had either kicked them, killed them or both. Then, presumably, had logged out rather than face Bobby’s wrath.

Still, you didn’t get to be (or stay) an R9 if you argued with the boss, so KillerSaint had barely grumbled about the waste of his own precious gaming time before he had ported to the location from which the original distress calls had emanated.

He hadn’t found any evidence of foul play.

There were no bodies, no marks of a battle, no trace whatsoever of either the two newbies or the bad tempered Gordon.

There was, however, something weird.

Something that was most likely the cause of the initial distress calls.

A huge pulsing ring of black energy.

KillerSaint assumed it was a port leading somewhere. It definitely had that kind of ‘Stargate’ vibe. And yet, at the same time, it reminded him equally of an artistic impression of a black hole. Or perhaps a portal to the Phantom Zone. (Pastor Jim’s DC comic collection included an original edition of #283, ‘The Phantom Superboy’, so he knew all about the Kryptonian prison dimension.)

He briefly considered calling Bobby, then paused. For exactly the same reason Gordon had failed to report in.

Whatever this thing was, it didn’t belong in Moondoor. Yet, nothing existed inside Moondoor except items programmed by the developers. So, whatever this was, the developers had put it there.

And that meant…

It _had_ to be an ‘Easter Egg’.

Perhaps a route to a secret level full of treasures or perhaps a hidden area of the game stuffed full of high-end Quests.

And, nice guy in Real Life or not, KillerSaint wasn’t any more inclined to share the goodies with the rest of his guild than Gordon had been.

So, instead of reporting in, KillerSaint holstered his guns and stepped into the circle of darkness.

…

It took another forty minutes before Ash declared the cave fully cleared of Gremloids. So tired, aching a little (particularly Dean whose shoulders had really felt the strain of continually wielding the sword) but supremely pleased with themselves, the four made their way back to the roadhouse in triumph.

Their victory parade was only slightly dampened by the fact Ellen refused to let them into the roadhouse before they’d made use of a cold water hose and washed off the majority of the blood slime that was coating their hair and faces. Cleaning their clothes was just a matter of sliding their outfits in and out of their inventories but, without actually logging in and out of the game, there was no way to clean their bodies except good old fashioned soap and water.

Dean, Ash and Charlie_ had_ intended to take the easier (warmer) route but, for some reason, Jimmy was worried that if he logged out he might not be able to return until the next day. None were quite ready to go back to the real world anyway. They were still high on adrenaline and buzzing with the kind of camaraderie that came from fighting together. So they decided to show solidarity and all four shared a cold shower in the yard of the Roadhouse.

Then, sitting inside the bar, they drank beer, ate burgers and shared the high of a completed Quest.

It didn’t seem to matter to any of the others that the ‘Quest’ hadn’t appeared on their system interfaces. Neither Ash nor Jimmy were in need of resources as rewards and Charlie was satisfied with the XP she’d gained and was apparently willing to hold back judgement on why Ellen’s quests weren’t _Quests_. She wasn’t yet ready to accept Dean’s explanation but was letting the matter slide for now.

Dean had only received a total of 100 FP for the Gremloid massacre, which was disappointing, but the three levels he’d gained were invaluable in themselves. Checking his scorecard, he was pleased to see he was still increasing his HP at double the rate of normal players and, interestingly, Ash confirmed that the additional heath points still weren’t registering on his public profile.

“You’re a really effective fighter and surprisingly strong for your level,” Jimmy said, suddenly, as though he could read Dean’s thoughts.

“It’s probably because of my rig,” Dean dissembled.

“Plus your previous experience,” Ash added quickly. “It’s not like you’re a _real_ newbie, after all. You’re like Charlie. You’ve both got all the moves but you need these avatars to catch up with your brains.”

“Tell me about it,” Charlie sighed. “I can’t believe how many stupid mistakes I made today because this body just won’t move the way my mind expects it to. Between having dropped 30 character levels and losing my immersion tank, it’s a real learning curve. Damn, I miss my bespoke avatar.”

“You used to have a bespoke avatar?” Jimmy asked, his ears pricking with interest. When Charlie glowered at him forbiddingly, he gave an apologetic shrug. Then he explained how he was having problems with his own avatar’s interface and had briefly considered swapping to a generic one instead.

“Don’t do it,” Charlie said, relaxing when she realised Jimmy wasn’t fishing for _her _personal information but was just looking for advice. “Generic avatars are fine if you don’t know any better but once you’re used to playing in a virtual body that so closely echoes your own physical dimensions, it’s really hard to adjust. I literally keep missing my mouth when I try to drink because these arms are too damned short.”

“Do you think many bespoke avatars portray genuine likenesses then?” Jimmy asked, with a sly sidewards glance in Dean’s direction. Dean was now deep in conversation with Ash and Ellen at the bar, so Jimmy took advantage of their distraction. “I’m sure most people ‘upgrade’ themselves in game. Like Dean, say. I mean, just as a _for instance_. I mean it’s highly unlikely he looks _anything_ like that in real life, isn’t it?”

“You’d be surprised,” Charlie said, hiding a smile at his poorly concealed interest. “The vast majority of people actually pick near mirror images of themselves. I think, honestly, that people only really feel the true benefit of being in a virtual world if they genuinely feel like themselves while they’re here. It’s hard to convince yourself you are really in Moondoor if you aren’t even inside a body you’re familiar with. So the majority of bespoke avatars are pretty lifelike except for the obvious kind of tweaks, like people making themselves slimmer or taller or whatever. A lot of guys add muscle or cover up bald spots, but that’s just cosmetic stuff not fundamental changes. Others, like Dean here, don’t need cosmetic tweaking anyway. He’s sickeningly good looking in real life anyway.”

“How do you know?” Jimmy asked.

“Well, I know _generally_ because I used to program avatars for this game. But if you mean how do I know about Dean, the answer is I know him in real life.”

Jimmy's eyes widened in surprise. “You’re real life friends?”

“I don’t think I’d go that far, well, not yet anyway,” Charlie admitted. “Truth is, we’re both really good real life friends of Ash. Dean and I are relatively recent acquaintances.”

“Wow,” Jimmy said, genuinely stunned. It had never even occurred to him that the other three players might know each other outside of the game. Under the circumstances, he was surprised they’d let a complete stranger like him into their group that afternoon. He wondered whether he was being presumptuous in hoping they’d let him continue playing with them. When he’d been envisaging the possibility of continuing to play the game alongside Dean for the next several weeks, it had stupidly never occurred to him that Dean already had an established network of people to play with.

It was highly unlikely that all three of them would welcome him to remain with them in-game, he decided, feeling suddenly totally dejected.

Maybe they had just felt sorry for him.

Maybe they’d only invited him along to hunt the gremloids because they had been too polite to leave him behind.

Maybe they…

“Good news,” Dean said, returning to the table. “Ash has just sweet-talked Ellen into sponsoring you into the Hunter guild, Jimmy.”

“Really?” he asked, his heart thundering with sudden excitement.

“Of course,” Dean announced with a careless shrug. “It’ll be a lot easier to Quest together if we’re all Guildmates.”

So maybe, just maybe, he _was_ welcome, after all.

And Jimmy, for the first time in his whole life, understood how it felt to get _picked_ to join a team.


	29. Consider me Switzerland.

Sam used his key card to enter the building, tapping in the four digits of that week’s code, then walked the gauntlet of the lobby’s security cameras, through the metal and explosives detectors, up to the large imposing desk where Joe McGrath, a big, gruff ex-cop, merely grunted at him in bored acknowledgement. Sam utilised the finger-print scanner, then grimaced a smile for the facial recognition camera, and then, after a brief delay, McGrath’s printer churned out a temporary pass which the security guard handed over with another grunt.

The multi-layered security protocols within the building were a nonsensical amount of overkill for the offices of a Law Firm, in Sam’s opinion. The internal security passes were invalidated every time someone left the building. On a day when he had several external appointments, Sam could be forced to reapply for an internal pass half a dozen times. But, without a pass, it wasn’t even possible to exit the lobby. Despite the building having stairwells, as mandated by fire precautions imposed by the City, the stairs were sealed behind doors that could only be opened from within. So the only way to access the rest of the building from the lobby area was via elevators that were strictly controlled by the temporary passes.

Entering one of the elevators, Sam inserted the card into the slot beneath the dark control pad and five of the dozen buttons lit up, offering him only the options of LB, B, 3, 4 and 5.

Floor three was a general access area. It housed the canteen, the gym and several rec rooms. It also contained a lounge area for lesser clients and some private rooms for interviews and meetings.

Floor four was where the majority of the administrative staff, law clerks, legal secretaries and paralegals were based.

Floors five to eight were for Associates. The hierarchical positioning of their offices meant only the most senior Associates were based on the eighth floor. As a mere first year Associate, still referred to by most senior staff as an ‘Intern’, Sam’s office was little more than a rabbit-hutch on the Fifth Floor.

That wasn’t where he was headed though.

He pressed the button marked LB, because the lower basement was where the Firm archived all of its paperwork, including non-current case files.

The fact that the Archive was available to _all_ staff, with LB being an option on all internal passes except those issued to visiting clients, could have suggested to the uninitiated that it was one of the least secure parts of the building. That assumption would have been incorrect. 

Exiting the elevator into the lower basement, Sam was forced to repeat fingerprint and facial recognition procedures _plus_ a voice recognition protocol that required him to speak a specific phrase that changed monthly. Completing those allowed him through a metal vault door that looked more suited to a room housing safety deposit boxes than one filled with paperwork and stored hard drives.

As the door closed behind him, Sam took a deep breath. Although he was still two doors away from the pure environs of the temperature and atmospherically controlled storage areas, he was already breathing the higher, purer air of the oxygen-rich filtration system. In front of him was a huge, oak-built reception desk, similar to that which might be found in a grand library. The counter, though, which ran the full width of the room, was so forbiddingly high that even Sam could only just see the dark hair of the man seated behind its wooden front.

“Unless my nose deceives me, I believe that waft of deliciousness is the scent of young Master Winchester.”

Sam grinned, as the Archivist raised his head enough to peek over the counter in his direction.

“I come bearing gifts,” he confirmed, reaching inside his shoulder-bag and carefully retrieving a still warm, slightly greasy, individual pizza box before reaching up and placing it on top of the counter like a penitent offering alms.

The Archivist raised himself from his chair, his bony body unfurling in a mass of overlong limbs, until he was poised over the pizza box like a suited praying mantis, his cadaver-thin face opening into a wide, if somewhat alarming, smile.

“I _do_ love pizza,” he said, pressing the button that opened a section of the counter to create a doorway. “Come through. Sit down. Pray tell me what world shattering emergency brings you to my domain on a Sunday evening.”

….

“So,” Jimmy said, offering Charlie an apologetic but hopeful smile. “I do realize talking ‘shop’ during leisure hours is a breach of social etiquette. However, I was intrigued by your mention of having worked specifically with the design of avatars for this game. Would you consider it a total imposition for me to ask you for advice regarding my faulty interface?”

“Jeez,” Dean sighed. “Just help the guy out already, Charlie, before his own politeness chokes him to death.”

“Good manners are important,” Jimmy pronounced, frowning at Dean disapprovingly.

“What he said,” Charlie agreed with a smirk. “What exactly _is _wrong with your interface, Jimmy?”

Jimmy flushed, his eyes darting shiftily away from her interested expression. “It’s going to sound a bit…um…foolish, possibly, but it’s not simply that I have apparently lost assets such as my Realm Ports. Rather than simply accessing the data I require as normal, I find myself constantly struggling to access any information of import. If I _specifically_ phrase a request in the most exact of terms, my interface _does_ frequently provide the required information but the process is unnecessarily clumsy and awkward. Were I to allow myself to anthropomorphize, I would state the interface is being deliberately obtuse.”

“Perhaps it is,” Ash teased. “Perhaps it’s just being an asshole.”

“Perception of life in inanimate objects is a primary symptom of craving social contact,” Jimmy announced grimly. “It is not something I allow myself to indulge in.”

“Huh?” Dean asked.

Charlie kicked him under the table. “He means he’s lonely,” she muttered quietly.

Not quietly enough, though, as Jimmy turned and looked at them with a sad but defiant look. “I am self-aware enough to understand that my lack of social interactions in my real life may be coloring my perceptions within this artificial environment,” he said, with precise dignity.

Well, that was a sucky thought, Dean decided. Because _he_ was definitely anthropomorphizing the fuck out of Loki and the way Jimmy’s S.I. was making him drag information out of it like blood from a stone definitely reminded him of the way Loki had interacted with him at first. Which also reminded him that Loki still owed him an explanation; _“Do YOU know what’s going on with Jimmy’s S.I.? ‘Cos it seems to me that he’s got a V.I. in there, like you, and the guy is being a total dick, also like you used to be.”_

“Awww, does that mean you like me now?”

_“Never said that. But I admit you’re not a **total **dick, anymore,” _Dean said.

“Look, what I said before about not saying anything to Jimmy… that still stands, Dean. Whatever you do, don’t tell him your interface is also different. I get you’re wanting to reassure the guy that he’s not just being a sad, no-mate loser but this isn’t about his ‘feelings’. Don’t risk everything just to make the guy feel less of a sad chump, Dean. The thing is, all of the new immersion tanks have the capacity to accept a V.I. interface but only a very select few Boss players will ever be seeded with one. This Jimmy, whoever he is, was definitely not on the radar to get one.”

Dean suddenly thought he understood. “_The V.I. seeding was only supposed to happen with players who are Boss characters?” _he asked._ “I guess that makes sense. Since the game going forward is going to allow any player to become a ‘boss’, I guess the capacity for the V.I. seeding will have to be inbuilt into everyone’s rigs from now on but only activated if or when they become a Knight. So Jimmy’s V.I. has triggered accidentally but you think if he understands what has happened and that I have one too, he’ll realise I’m a Knight and maybe kill me to become a Boss himself? I mean, I could see that, maybe, with _another _player but not Jimmy. I know I’ve barely met the guy but he doesn’t seem the type_.”

“He didn’t get to be a character level 64 by running around Moondoor rescuing kittens out of trees,” Loki pointed out dryly. “Nice guy or not, the sooner you accept Jimmy_ must_ also be a BAMF, the better.”

“_I can’t see the harm in him knowing he’s accidentally been seeded with a V.I., though,” _Dean argued. “_The information about the Knights hasn’t actually been released to the other players yet, has it? As far as I understand it, the game blogs won’t announce that information before all the Knights get out of Purgatory and everyone else’s player levels get reset.”_

“Not ‘reset’, exactly,” Loki corrected. “They simply will not share the same equivalence as post darkness characters such as yourself.”

“_You lost me_.”

Loki sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this yet but, what the hell, you’ll find out soon enough anyway. After you hit character level 15, the level you _should _have been when you left Purgatory, your next level up will take you straight to level 50. Then you’ll increase 10 levels at a time, until you hit 100. Then you change to ‘Dark Levels’.”

“_The highest player in Moondoor is currently at 93_,” Dean mused. “_The cap is currently 100.”_

“The cap will remain 100 for other players,” Loki said. “Only the Knights are able to go past 100 to 101.”

Dean understood. It was a simple, but elegant, solution. The normal players could continue battling for position within their own hierarchy but they would never escape it unless they accepted the Quest to become a Knight. And the Knights, by definition, would always be stronger than them and capable of squashing them like bugs. The longer the Knights survived, the more Darkness Levels they’d achieve and so it would become increasingly impossible for a normal player to defeat them.

So for a player like Jimmy, the _only_ serious chance he had at beating a Knight was to kill them well _before_ they reached level 101.

Such as when they were only a mere, helpless level 11, maybe.

“_I still don’t believe Jimmy is that kind of asshole_,” Dean said.

“Willing to risk our lives on it?” Loki demanded archly.

Which gave Dean pause. Loki was right. This wasn’t just about Dean, was it? If he trusted Jimmy and it proved to be a mistake, a lot more was at stake than just Dean’s survival in the game. Still, what Jimmy presumably didn’t know was that Dean would have to be killed _ten_ times. Sure, Jimmy might betray him and stab him in the back… but it would only happen once before Dean wised up to him.

“Ordinarily, I’d agree,” Loki said, interrupting his musing. “So, I guess I’ll have to admit something else. I…um…how do I put this? Um… oh, fuck it… I may as well just rip off the band-aid I guess… I’m, well, nottheVIyouweresupposedtobeseededwith,” he ended in a spewed rush of words.

“_WHAT_?”

“Just hear me out,” Loki said. “Thing is, you were always going to be seeded with a V.I. just like all the other Knights. And, before you ask, yeah they all have V.I.’s too. And, at the moment, they’re probably just being awkward little dick interfaces like whoever the fuck is riding Jimmy because, well, it’s not _easy_ you know? We’re different species, we speak different languages, our thought processes are totally alien and we sure as fuck aren’t used to being trapped inside fragile, tiny meat suits. It takes time to merge and _more_ time to learn how to take over the controls.”

“_Woah_,” Dean said. “_Time out. Take over what fucking controls_? _You’re telling me you’re planning on possessing me, you fucker_?”

“Listen to what I’m actually saying, Deano. I’m telling you the V.I. you were _supposed to have_ was planning to possess you. Because, well, because last time was a cluster-fuck, okay? Last time we all tried the merge and play nicely with others bullshit and look what happened. So, well, some of my brothers don’t want to leave this to you meatsuits at all, this time. They think they can do the job better by themselves.”

“_And you don’t_?”

“Honestly? I don’t know,” Loki replied. “Consider me Switzerland in this. I’m not planning to get involved any more than I have to. Tell the truth, I was never planning to even let you know I was in here but, well, it got pretty damned boring pretending to be an S.I. It’s bad enough being stuck in here with you without acting like a mindless puppet too.”

“_So get out_,” Dean snarled.

“I can’t do that,” Loki sighed, “Or trust me, I would. Thing is, I’m only sitting here like a lemon whenever you’re in-game to keep a non-vacancy sign hanging in your window. Otherwise, your real rider is going to jump right in here and make himself at home. You think I’m a pain in the ass? You ain’t seen nuthin. So you can’t let Jimmy know I’m here or whoever’s riding him will figure out that what’s currently looking like a glitch preventing your V.I. from seeding himself is actually ME sitting my ass here and then all the fuck kind of whupass is going to land on both of us.

“And you need to be careful what you tell Charlie too. In fact, don’t tell her anything. She’s one of _them_. She’s a spy maybe. Yeah, that’s got to be it. A company spy.”

“_Okay, just calm down, man. Charlie is not a spy_.”

“She’s one of them. A developer.”

“_An ex-developer_,” Dean corrected. “_She got fired, Loki. I highly doubt she’s spying for them. She probably wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire_.”

“What if she’s lying?” Loki asked, slyly. “Maybe she’s just _saying_ she was fired to make you trust her and then, wham, bam, she sucker punches you when you’re least expecting it.”

“_Charlie isn’t lying_,” Dean stated firmly. Admittedly, he did have a fractional moment of doubt but quashed it immediately. Ash trusted Charlie. Dean trusted Ash. So Dean, ergo, trusted Charlie.

End of.

Loki was quiet for a few moments but then said. “Aha… no one on the dev team payroll called Charlie, Charles, Charlene, Charcoal, Char-broiled, Nothing, Nada, Nyet. She’s using a false name. She’s a spy.”

“_Ash told me she used to be called Celeste something or other when he first met her at MIT. Charlie is probably just a nickname_.”

Loki was silent for longer this time but when he came back his tone was no longer one of high-pitched hysterical panic. It was something far worse. A low, serious, we’re all fucked, kind of tone.

“Um, Dean. Is her name Celeste Middleton?”

Dean couldn’t remember for sure but it sounded about right. “_Um, think so. Why_?”

“Because she’s not a spy,” Loki said, his voice completely subdued.

“_And? So? Isn’t that a good thing_?”

“Only if you’re into the whole zombie apocalypse thing.”

“_Huh_?”

“She’s _dead_, Dean. According to the RRE personnel files, Celeste Middleton is deceased.”

“_How are you accessing the RRE personnel files_?”

“Focus, Dean. The important thing is that she’s DEAD. She apparently died on Friday evening when her entire building complex blew up like a super-nova.”

“_It’s Sunday. Even if that were true, and it isn’t because, hello, she’s here, who the fuck would update a personnel file between Friday and Sunday anyway? I mean is that an automated thing? You pop your clogs and some computer somewhere sends out bulletins to all interested parties_?”

“I think you’re missing the point.”

“_I’m not. I’m just racing past the bullshit straight to the heart of the matter. If Charlie’s building blew up and the authorities thought she was inside, which clearly she wasn’t since she’s here but, if they thought she was inside it then the absolute first time anyone would think to contact her employers is tomorrow.”_

“Unless…”

“_Exactly…”_ Dean agreed grimly. “_Hang on. No point saying anything else before verifying this crap_.”

“Um, Charlie,” he said, interrupting her conversation with Jimmy. “Do me a favour? Log out a minute and check the local news wherever you used to live?”

She blinked at him stupidly. “What?”


	30. Is it still paranoia if they ARE out to get you?

“It was several years ago, but I do recall the case,” the Archivist agreed, after swallowing his last bite of pizza and dabbing his lips almost daintily with a fabric napkin from his top pocket. “Filed under the name Ghost Facers, I believe.”

He turned to his computer, tapped a few letters into his keyboard then grinned in satisfaction. “Indeed,” he said. “Spangler and Zeddmore vs Richard Roman Enterprises. It didn’t reach further than District court though. Mister Roman, Senior, successfully convinced the federal judge in the case that the young gentlemen in the case were merely patent trolls. There was, it should be said, considerable evidence suggesting Mister Roman was correct in his assertion.”

Sam nodded his agreement. He recalled the details of the case himself. Harry Spangler and Ed Zeddmore owned a company ‘GhostFacers’ that had a history of buying patents from the estates of deceased parties or bankrupt companies for the sole purpose of seeking payment from other companies who were possibly infringing on those patents. It was a potentially lucrative business model for the pair, since most of their targets settled out of court rather than face the cost of litigation. It was also, it should be said, a perfectly legal business model (if possibly somewhat morally questionable) but was frowned on by many judges.

What had been particularly interesting about that specific case was that Nigel Roman had taken that particular line of defence against the litigating pair and had depended upon the federal judge dismissing the case out of hand rather than applying the most obvious defence which would have absolutely guaranteed success.

Because the patent in question had been regarding a piece of hardware that RRE were supplying only to the U.S. Government at that time. Since the government held the right to use any patented invention without permission, a protection passed also to contractors working on its behalf, a successful claim could only have been brought against the Government itself and Spangler and Zeddmore could only have won compensation from the Government.

So the case against RRE had been dead in the water from the get-go and consequently it made no sense that Nigel Roman had bothered defending it at all.

That, however, wasn’t _specifically_ why Sam was interested in the case.

Several years on from the court case, Sam was reasonably certain that the patent in question was now being used by RRE for non-military purposes. It appeared to have been utilized as a major vital component in the latest generation of RRE’s immersion tanks.

So should the GhostFacers choose to revisit their claim for patent infringement by taking the case to the Court of Appeals and there face a judge more inclined to apply the precise letter of the law rather than take a moral stance on the situation, there was not only a significant chance that Spangler and Zeddmore might actually win their case but this time RRE would not be able to pass the cost of any compensation awarded to the Government.

Sam had already done the preliminary work necessary to fake a believable letter of enquiry from the litigants, one suggesting that they were considering that course of action. He’d also carefully buried a trail within the Firm’s record of incoming mail to show why the correspondence had mistakenly arrived at his desk rather than correctly been passed to someone in Nigel Roman’s department. For further veracity, he’d hacked into Ed Zeddmore’s personal computer and buried a copy of the letter on his hard-drive, an electronic copy that clearly showed the letter as being authored by Zeddmore himself. Should any of this erupt backwards towards the GhostFacers, forensic investigation would disprove any attempt by Zeddmore to deny his involvement.

Sam would have felt guilty about that except for the fact the patent wasn’t for something actually created by Spangler and Zeddmore and they’d paid a mere pittance for the patent rights to the widow of the man who had invented the device. So he shared the Federal Judge’s opinion that the GhostFacers were just a pair of ambulance chasing shysters out to make a quick buck.

However, before approaching Nigel Roman himself, it would make sense for a young, hungry first year Associate such as himself to attempt to head the possible impending disaster off for several days before reaching out for a Partner’s advice. To make it appear as though he had done so, Sam needed there to be a record of him pulling the file from the archive.

A record of him having done so several days earlier would add further veracity to his story and that would require the co-operation of Mortimer Blake, the Archivist, since the strange, old-fashioned man’s computer was not on the mainframe network and consequently couldn’t be remotely hacked.

“I don’t suppose you could input me as having collected this file off you one day last week?” Sam asked, with his best puppy eyes. “I completely forgot, and,” he indicated the severe bruising on his face, “I’ve had a bit of a bad week already without adding an ass-kicking from a Partner to the mix.”

The Archivist looked at him closely, his eyes twinkling with some internal mirth.

“As a rule, I don’t falsify records, Master Winchester. But I liked the pizza. I suppose I might make an exception this once.”

…

Charlie didn’t return to the Roadhouse so, after an anxious ten minutes or so of waiting, Ash and Dean said their goodbyes to Jimmy and logged off themselves to follow her back into the real world.

By the time Dean had deactivated his immersion tank, hauled himself out, had showered the gunk off, gotten dressed and been ready to leave his apartment to go to ‘Lil Beanz, a good forty five minutes later, Ash and a pale-faced Charlie were already at his front door. Taking one look at her tear-reddened eyes and haunted expression, Dean didn’t need to be a psychic to understand what she meant when she demanded, “How did you know?”

“Loki told me,” he said, simply, and saw not only understanding but a definite dawning _belief_ in her eyes.

Fortunately, Ash missed the underlying significance of the statement, merely picking up on, “So the game V.I.’s don’t merely exist within a closed network. They have access to the RRE mainframe?”

“And the WWW too apparently. But Loki got the information directly from your personnel file,” Dean told Charlie. “You’re already marked as deceased.”

“Well that was stupid of them,” she snarled. “Considering the fire service are still trolling through the wreckage and I’m officially only one of many ‘missing’ persons at the moment.”

“I don’t want to sound paranoid,” Dean said, “but does anyone else here think the timing of this accidental building explosion is a bit suspect? You ask a few too many questions about this old Portland fire and, oh gosh, fancy that, your building explodes into a fireball too. Dunno about you guys, but I’m of the school of thought that one fire might be an accident but two is kinda careless.”

“What do you call three?” Charlie asked soberly.

“Huh?”

“Three fires, Dean. Well, I guess a fire, an explosion and then a fire _with_ an explosion.”

“What fire with an explosion?”

“The reason it took me a while to access the local news about my building, which should have hit front page of most of the online _nationals, ___given the fatalities, is it was knocked off front page on Saturday morning when the Connor Beverly Behavioral Medicine Center in Ohio blew up.”

“And? So?” Dean asked. “Never heard of the place. What’s the significance? ‘cos it’s clear you think it’s somehow related.”

“The Connor Beverly Behavioral Medicine Center wouldn’t have pinged my radar either,” Charlie admitted. “But the timing, and the method, rang alarm bells with me and it made me wonder about the missing programmer. The one who supposedly had a breakdown back when the original fire took place. So I hacked RRE’s personnel files. But I wasn’t looking for _my_ records, I was looking for any evidence of payments between REE and the Center. Bingo. They’ve been paying the residence fees there for an _Anna Milton_ for almost 15 years.”

“And this Anna Milton is the missing programmer who worked with my mom?” Dean asked.

“Your Mom?” Ash said, completely lost.

“Shhuuush,” Charlie told him, waving him away like an irritating fly. “Just let it go. I’ll catch you up to speed later.” Then she turned her full attention back to Dean. “Remember me telling you there were eight programmers? Six who died, one who went crazy and disappeared and, of course, Richard Roman. Well, Anna Milton was the one who had the breakdown. Only, maybe Anna really just got locked away to shut her up. After all, if you’re right and the game killed the six who died, maybe it’s reasonable to accept that Roman couldn’t bring himself to simply kill her to stop her talking. So he solved the problem by getting her certified insane instead.”

Dean thought about it and shook his head. “That might work in a movie, but not in real life. No genuine medical center would keep someone locked up for fifteen years without valid reason. It might be possible to convince a corrupt doctor or two to get someone committed but this Anna would have come into contact with numerous medical professionals over the years. At least _one_ of them would have queried the diagnosis if she wasn’t genuinely batshit.”

“You’re right,” Charlie agreed. “But that depends on your definition of sanity, doesn’t it? I mean, what if her true story was so outlandish that it would sound insane to an average person?” She stared at him significantly, willing him to get her point before she was forced to state in Ash’s hearing Dean’s _own _outlandish beliefs.

Luckily, she saw Dean’s green eyes flare with understanding before he carefully blanked his expression again. “So we need to talk to this Anna Milton?”

“Unfortunately, although the fire department is still shifting rubble in search of bodies, Anna Milton is one of the people already firmly confirmed to be dead.”

“Why now?” Ash blurted. “I mean, why wait fifteen years and then kill her anyway?”

“I think it’s my fault,” Charlie admitted sadly. “Given the timing, I can’t see anything else making sense. Less than 24 hours after I sent Roman that email, I’m fired, my building ‘blows up’ and then Anna’s hospital catches fire and blows up. I’ve got to be the common denominator here. Let’s face it, I’m the only one who’s been stumbling around exposing the skeletons in the closet. So it’s my fault.” She looked at Dean, her face tear-streaked and pale, “They’ve found eight bodies so far in my apartment block. Six people, other than me, are still missing. Seven people died in Ohio. There are dozens injured. And this is all on me, Dean.”

Dean always hated his chair, but never more than at that precise moment when it prevented him from taking the small woman in his arms and giving her the hug she so obviously needed. He literally ached at his impotence, his inability to reach out and offer her physical comfort. So, instead, he did what he _could_ do, and lost his temper instead.

“That’s a fucking bunch of crap and you know it,” he snapped. “If, and it _is _still an ‘if’ until we have actual evidence rather than suppositions, if RRE was behind what happened then this is on THEM, Charlie. End of. Yeah, you asking questions might have made someone panic, but you aren’t responsible for how they chose to react. I get you feeling bad for the people who died but feeling sympathy is fine. Feeling guilty is just self-indulgence. Cut it out. If these people really did try to kill you, I think our biggest problem right now is them finding out you’re still alive.”

“Oh shit,” Ash said. “Tell me you booked your flight under Bradbury.”

“I did,” Charlie said, her already pale face turning completely ashen as she realised her decision to purchase her illegal avatar had probably saved her life.

“Thank fuck,” Dean breathed, although there was something else niggling at the back of his head. Some elusive thought that he couldn’t quite pin down, but was absolutely positive was critically important.

“I dunno what to do,” Ash said, his own voice tinged with panic. “It’s like part of me wants to dial 911 but we’re going to sound like we’re conspiracy theory nutcases. We can’t prove anything, can we? Plus we can’t let anyone know Charlie got out of that building. And, on top of that, we’ve kinda got to convince quarter of a million people to stop playing a game because it’s going to kill them? Yeah, I can already see them getting the straitjackets out ready for us.”

“Like they did for Anna Milton, maybe?” Charlie suggested quietly.

“Yeah, okay,” Dean said, accepting the point. Maybe it _had_ been that damned easy for RRE to get Anna certified. If she had claimed the characters in Moondoor were alive (and Dean highly suspected that _was_ the case) then anything else she had known or suspected about RRE would have been completely dismissed out of hand. RRE were untouchable. Unless you knew the truth, none of their actions made sense but revealing the truth was a one-way ticket to a funny farm. But surely Anna must have had friends or family who would at least have listened to her. He sure as hell wouldn’t allow Sam to ever get…

“Fuck,” he exclaimed, as the elusive thought suddenly slammed into his forebrain. “Sam. I need to call Sam.”

“What? Why?” Charlie demanded, picking up on his panic immediately but not understanding the reasoning for it.

“You said you were the only person looking for skeletons,” he reminded her grimly. “But you were wrong.”

Charlie’s eyes widened in horrified understanding. “The email. Your brother was asking about your Mom too,” she agreed. “But… but maybe it’s just co-incidence.”

Dean looked at her grimly. “You’re seriously going to go with that? He’s lost or broken his phone,” Dean continued, as he grabbed his laptop and sent a number of skype requests. Then, when they remained unanswered, he sent Sam an urgent email. “He said he’d call me tomorrow but…”

“Okay,” she interrupted. “I accept that he _could_ be in danger. For all I know, we could _all_ be in danger. But, realistically, I think there’s a vast difference between RRE probably acting against two _known_ threats such as a couple of ex-employees and them discovering some random person is trying to look into them. I really can’t see how your brother could possibly have triggered any alerts in RRE.”

As her words sank in, Dean felt a lot of his instinctive panic ease back into vague disquiet. Charlie was almost certainly right, he realised. Even if Sam was showing his normal dogged determination in investigating RRE, Dean couldn’t see how the company would have become aware of his interest yet.

Even so, he pinged off another email demanding Sam call him without delay.


	31. Dungeon Run

After a night of broken sleep, his rest constantly disturbed by nightmares, Dean gave up and rose early. In the light of day, he couldn’t recall any specific details of his dreams, he was just left with a vague unsettled feeling and a sense of physical tiredness caused by his disturbed rest.

His mood wasn’t helped when he checked his inbox and found no reply from Sam. It was, he ruefully accepted, highly likely his brother simply hadn’t bothered logging into his email on a Sunday evening and was equally unlikely to do so before heading to work on a Monday morning. And Dean still believed Charlie had been right that Sam was unlikely to be in genuine danger.

Even so, a low thrum of anxiety continued to niggle at him so he sent yet another email prompting Sam to call him as soon as he got home from work.

Then, after a quick breakfast of coffee and toast, Dean decided the best way to distract himself would be to return to Moondoor. It was only 8am, so it was highly unlikely any of his friends would be logged into the game, but he could at least hit Ellen up for a new quest and maybe interrogate Loki a little. If the V.I. could access Charlie’s personnel records, it stood to reason he also had access to other information on RRE’s mainframe. 

Maybe he could get the irritating but undeniably useful V.I. to investigate the company records for details of exactly what had happened 15 years earlier. Dean wasn’t yet ready to face the bombshell of his Mother’s involvement with Roman Enterprises. His feelings were too raw on the matter and it stood to reason that finding out the details of exactly how she’d died was going to not only open up old wounds but probably stick a knife in them for good measure. But at the same time he knew it was something he was going to have to deal with sooner or later. Inconvenient truths rarely stayed buried forever. They had a nasty way of crawling out of their graves like zombies, ready to jump out and bite you when you least expected them. So maybe it would be best to just rip the band aid off and get it over and done with.

Entering the Roadhouse so early, he expected it to be almost deserted.

He definitely didn’t expect to find Ellen holding court behind the Bar counter with Ash, Charlie and Jimmy sitting on barstools, tucking into what looked like far tastier breakfasts than mere toast.

“Hey, guys,” he said, pulling up a stool and joining them. “Don’t any of you have jobs to go to?”

Obviously, his comment was aimed at Ash and Jimmy rather than Charlie but when he saw her flinch slightly he mouthed a silent apology in her direction.

“I decided the buzzing metropolis that is my coffee emporium could remain closed for a week or two,” Ash said, with a smirk. “Though I am sure my disappointed customers are wailing, gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes with grief outside my locked door.”

“What customers?” Dean asked wryly.

“Exactly,” Ash agreed. “Besides, now you know about Frank there’s no reason for me to even pretend to keep the place open when I have better things to do right now.”

Dean flushed as his friend as good as confirmed that ‘Lil Beanz had never been anything other than a fake front operation to enable Ash to give him some much needed money. In retrospect, the whole thing should have been obvious. Why would someone like Ash want to work as a damned Barista, anyway?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Ash said quietly, “but you’re wrong. Sure I run ‘Lil Beanz like a hobby rather than a real business but it’s still important to me. Soon as we sort out _this_ shit, it’ll be open as normal again. Charlie’s got some big plans for it.”

“I do,” she agreed, laughing at Dean’s confusion. “I’m thinking full-on cyber café. Maybe even install some VR booths. We can’t afford immersion tanks, obviously, but it wouldn’t cost too much to set up more half-decent rigs like Ash and I are currently using. It would be completely unique, no competition at all.”

“There’s a reason no one else in town is offering it,” Dean pointed out. “There just isn’t enough reliable repeat business. To make it viable you’d need to charge a fee high enough to cover your electricity costs and anyone who could afford to pay that kind of money regularly could probably afford their own equipment.”

“Well, sure,” Ash said. “You’re right, at least you would be right if I actually _paid_ for my electricity.”

Dean opened his mouth, then closed it again. Probably best he didn’t know the details. So he turned his attention to Jimmy. “What about you, bud? No job to go to?”

“I am currently taking a ‘sabbatical’, you might call it. I have approximately six weeks at my leisure. After that time, I am highly unlikely to be available,” Jimmy replied cautiously.

Dean frowned a little, wondering whether he needed to re-assess Jimmy’s RL age. That six weeks sounded far too similar to a school vacation period. Was it possible Jimmy was just a kid playing ‘dress up’ with an adult avatar? Then again, what kid in the world could possibly have access to the kind of money required to buy a bespoke avatar at all? It was a mystery, sure, but unlikely to be related to Jimmy’s RL age. Dean decided not to press. The guy was entitled to his secrets. It wasn’t as though Dean didn’t have more than enough secrets of his own.

“Ellen was just telling us about a new Quest,” Ash said. “This one is pretty epic level and is coming from the Guild Master himself. The rewards are seriously nice but, more importantly, it’s going to offer some great levelling up opportunities for you and Charlie.”

Confused, Dean checked with Loki. The way Ash was describing it, this was a real genuine Quest that had therefore appeared in Ash’s system interface as normal but there was absolutely nothing on his own S.I. “I can’t see it,” he said.

Ash ducked his head with obvious embarrassment, “Yeah, well, about that,” he began. “Thing is… um…”

“What he’s trying to say,” Ellen interrupted impatiently, “is that _you’re_ not invited. The R10 requested the assistance of Ash and Jimiel only. I have, after some persuasion, managed to convince him to add Charlie to the Quest since her level is respectable enough that she might survive the encounter but Bobby said, and I quote, ‘I need real fighters for this, not newbie idjits,’.” The shrug she offered Dean was a peculiar mix of indifference and apology.

“We did, in turn, respectfully advise the Guildmaster that our acceptance of the Quest was conditional upon your inclusion,” Jimmy told him solemnly.

“Jimmy was surprisingly bad ass about it,” Charlie confirmed gleefully. “It’s amazing how someone can be so painfully polite and _still_ manage to tell someone to stuff his Quest where the sun don’t shine.”

Dean knew he shouldn’t feel so happy to hear that Jimmy had fought his corner like that.

But he did.

Still, he was completely confused now. “So, um, are we doing this thing or not?”

“We’re all going,” Ash confirmed. “Bobby has only _officially _authorised the actual Quest for us three but you’re coming along anyway. You can’t win the Quest rewards, but anything else like XP or… well, you know what,” he paused and gave Dean a significant look, not wanting to mention FP or SP in Jimmy’s hearing “… will still be available. Because the location is too far to reach swiftly on foot, the Guild have allocated 6 Realm Ports for Me, Charlie and Jimmy to get there and back. So, all I need to do is gift you 2 of my own Ports and you can come with us.”

“And this Bobby is okay with that?” Dean asked.

Ellen huffed and shrugged again. “He said ‘if the idjit wants to die that bad, I ain’t gonna stand in his way but I ain’t helping him commit suicide neither.’” Then she sighed and offered Dean a more genuine smile. “He’s a grumpy bastard but his heart’s in the right place. He’s just worried about you. Truth is, he’s worried about all of you. He doesn’t like the idea of giving a Quest like this to new Guild members at all. But one of our R8’s _and_ an R9 have gone awol unexpectedly and Ash and Jimiel are by far the highest level players in the Guild so Bobby’s having to make use of the assets available to him at this time. Even if they insist on bringing you and Charlie along for the ride.”

“So what’s the Quest,” Dean asked, feeling a thrum of anticipation. It was well past time for him to face a serious challenge. Sure, his character level was still dangerously low but he was missing playing Moondoor _properly_. All this werewolf and gremloid ganking was okay but nothing like the kind of _real_ play he’d experienced as his previous character in the game. So far, playing a ‘Boss’ had been pretty underwhelming. Sure, rising 11 levels in less than a week had been quite an epic rate of advancement but, still, when he’d accepted the idea of playing as a ‘Boss’ he’d kind of expected the experience to be a bit more, well, exciting.

“An epic quest to save tens or hundreds of thousands of people from dying in _your_ world not quite enough for you then?” Loki asked snarkily.

“_Fair point_,” Dean allowed, but Loki was missing _his_ point. Sure the overall objective here was a fuck load more important than whether Dean had ‘fun’, but without the adrenalin-fuel of real excitement in-game it was going to be really difficult to keep driving himself to level up enough to compete for the First Blade.

“The Quest,” Ash said, “is ‘Reclaim the Temple of Nergar’. Apparently some cult has taken over one of Moondoor’s temples and has dedicated it to the Dark Goddess. I’ll spare you the months-worth of historical details of the occupation since all that revisionist back-story has been inserted by the game mechanics. The relevant truth is this all only happened yesterday in real time. As far as I can tell, this scenario has been set up like a classic dungeon run. We need to defeat a Boss before we can re-dedicate the temple to Chuck and complete the Quest.”

“Do we know what level Boss is in place?” Dean asked.

“No details have been supplied,” Jimmy answered. “But the Quest is registering as an ‘Advanced Chain’ so we can reasonably expect it will require us to fight through guards, kill priests and acolytes, perhaps followed by a High Priest and then ultimately face a Boss.”

“Makes sense,” Dean agreed.

“It is probable that we will encounter many high level mobs, their strength growing exponentially as we advance through the dungeon levels,” Jimmy continued. “You and Charlie may well be unable to assist us past the first few initial levels. However, if we form a War Party, even if only Ash and I battle the most dangerous mobs, you and Charlie will still receive a certain degree of the XP from our battles.”

“Sure,” Dean agreed easily. He wasn’t going to argue with Jimmy’s assumption he was going to be as much use as a chocolate teapot. For one thing, Jimmy had no idea Dean was a lot stronger than he looked and for another, Jimmy was possibly right. As a level 64, Jimmy had the right to be a bit arrogant about his abilities. 

But with Ash along, even Jimmy might find himself being left in the dust. Ash could probably clear the whole dungeon by himself. With one hand behind his back.

All Dean was sure of was he was damned glad to have both of them on his side.

Ash transferred a couple of realm ports into Dean’s inventory. Ellen transferred Guild Store realm ports to Ash, Jimmy and Charlie. Then all four stepped out of the Roadhouse and ported together to Nergar.

The town of Nergar was one of the most Northern settlements in Moondoor. It was nestled at the foot of the Daniera Mountain Range, cradled in a horseshoe-shaped canyon that created a buffer against the chill winds that blew south from Arcturia. The town was stone-built and sprawling. Further south, its size and solid structure would have qualified it as a city but this far North, where few players ever ventured, the NPC population was far smaller than the number of buildings suggested, so on population level alone it qualified only as a town.

Dead centre in the town, however, was a huge building that was definitely reminiscent of a city cathedral. Not just _any_ cathedral. Whoever had designed the Temple of Nergar had plagiarised the French-gothic style of Notre-Dame.

“Should we be on the lookout for rampaging hunch backs?” Charlie asked, with a smirk.

“Do you think it’s supposed to be that black?” Dean countered, frowning at the temple. Whilst the surrounding buildings were granite gray, the temple appeared carved out of obsidian. Combined with the gothic architecture, the color created a Poe-worthy level of sinister oppression. He almost expected a raven to come flying off the ramparts.

“Nevermore,” Jimmy muttered.

Dean shot him a grin of appreciation.

“I think it’s shadow-touched,” Ash said. “It’s not so much that the building is black. It’s more that the building looks like it’s in night mode.”

“You’re right,” Charlie agreed. “The Temple is monochrome, as though it’s in permanent darkness, So, presumably, after we gank the Boss it will revert to the color of the surrounding buildings.”

“Well, that’s probably good news,” Dean pointed out. “We’d be in more trouble if the rest of the town had turned black too, because that would mean the area of Dark influence was spreading.”

“You had to say that, didn’t you?” Jimmy said, dryly, as two of the buildings adjacent to the temple winked and turned black.

“I just received a system update,” Ash said. “A time-to-complete countdown. We only have until sunset to complete the Quest.”

“What’s that? Twelve hours?” Charlie asked worriedly.

“I suspect, this far North, that twelve hours is optimistic,” Jimmy said. “I doubt we have more than ten hours before the sun sets in Nergar.”

“No time to waste then,” Dean said, retrieving only his broadsword and silver short sword from his inventory.

“You sure about that?” Ash asked quietly, nodding at the short sword in Dean’s hand.

Dean nodded firmly. He wasn’t going to touch the Crude Bone Dagger unless his life literally depended on it. The buff offered by the Mark of Cain wasn’t worth the risk of acquiring more SP accidentally.

“I’ll go first,” Ash said, casting a spell on his staff to make the orb glow brightly. It was, he thought, reasonable to assume the darkness cast over the building also extended to its interior. Besides, a glowing orb was always a cool prop.

“I’ll take the rear,” Jimmy said, firmly.

Dean and Charlie didn’t argue with the plan. Sure, being cast as the near to useless filling in the sandwich rankled with both of them but there was no arguing with the sense of having the two strongest players guarding them front and rear.

“I’m a southpaw,” Charlie told Dean as they entered the building in formation.

Dean nodded his understanding and consequently concentrated his attention to the right as they progressed through the dark interior of the building.

Ash’s orb lit up a rough circle of approximately 20 feet in diameter. Beyond its area of effect, the darkness was so black it felt like a gaping void. Even so, Dean still thought he could see shifting movement within the shadows. Insubstantial, impossible to define into recognisable shapes, yet distinct areas of deeper blackness moving in a pattern that clearly appeared to have some form of logic or reason. Then he saw a glint of something. Just a brief, barely visible flash of red light in the pitch black of the shadows. A glint like….

He thrust his sword forward as he sensed, rather than saw, an area of shadow burst free from the mass towards him.

He heard a yelp of pain, saw blood splatter onto the floor, saw a momentary flash of red again, but the only other indication he had truly struck something was Loki’s spoken confirmation he had gained XP from a critical hit.

“Fuckers are invisible,” he barked out in warning. “They’re fast and low but all I can see is the occasional reflection of an eye.”

“Some kind of wolves maybe,” Charlie agreed, as her own blade found purchase in an attacker approaching from their left.

Ash cursed and cast a wide-range illumination spell. His magic didn’t completely dispel the creatures’ invisibility cloaks but did at least apply a 30% debuff. As soon as the spell came into effect, the attackers were revealed to be huge dark hounds with menacing red eyes. Hell hounds. At 30%, the hounds remained smoky and insubstantial but the important thing was that they _were_ visible. A quick analysis revealed their health varied between 30 and 40 HP so even Dean could despatch any of them with a single strike of his sword.

Without Ash’s spell, though, Dean had no doubt the creatures would have easily overwhelmed him and ripped him limb from limb. It would have been impossible to defend himself from a pack of fully invisible enemies.

Behind him, he could hear the impact of Jimmy’s blade as the level 64 player made quick work of despatching all the hounds that approached from the rear. His movements were swift and sure, as he whirled like a dervish, swinging his broadsword like a scythe through the ranks of the hounds.

Ash, more of a showman, was despatching all the hounds in front of them by casting fireballs that exploded on impact.

So Charlie and Dean only needed to handle the odd beast that tried darting in from the side.

Within ten minutes, the level was cleared.

“That was surprisingly difficult for a first dungeon level,” Jimmy announced calmly, as he wiped blood and brains off his sword.

Dean agreed. It wasn’t just the level of the beasts (he would ordinarily have expected level one dungeon mobs to be no more than 10 to 20 HP) but the invisibility. That was the aspect that had raised the quest to ‘Advanced’ from the get-go. No mage lower than character level 30 would have been able to cast the debuff spell Ash had used. Which meant this Quest was only suitable for players who were level 30 or above.

No wonder Bobby had initially rejected Charlie as a candidate, let alone himself.

Ash had clearly had the same thought because he said, “Look, don’t take this the wrong way guys, but maybe Jimmy and I ought to enter the next level alone. We can call you through once we clear it. I came here thinking it would be four or five levels before we hit anything remotely dangerous. But if level one was that difficult, it’s only going to get worse.”

“Ash is correct,” Jimmy said, apologetically. “There is no sense in either of you facing unnecessary risks today.”

“Fuck that,” Dean spat.

“What he said,” Charlie agreed.

Jimmy shrugged at Ash in a what-can-you-do gesture. Ash sighed his agreement but said, “Don’t come bitching to me tomorrow when you both have mega death debuffs to deal with.”

And, bottom line, that _was_ the worst thing they were facing here.

Well, that and the not-inconsequential matter of Dean losing one of his limited 10 lives but since none of the others seemed to be remembering his unique vulnerability in that moment, Dean didn’t feel it was necessary to remind them.

So the four of them, still in formation, passed through the door that led into the next level.


	32. Demons are a 'thing' now

“What the fuck were those?” Charlie demanded, as they all collapsed on the floor, panting for breath, as her system interface confirmed the second level had been cleared. Initially, they had thought the level was just filled with a higher quantity of the Hell hounds but these particular black dogs had been resistant to Ash’s fireballs and had only appeared vulnerable to silver. They had also varied between 50 and 80 HP, so it took at least two strikes of most weapons to kill them.

“Skinwalkers, I think,” Dean replied. “Because they sure as hell weren’t werewolves.”

“Definitely skinwalkers,” Ash confirmed, “because I was bitten. I felt the infection instantly, as it tried to transform me, but it was only a level 8 infection spell and I have level 10 magic resistance so it was easy to negate.”

“Anyone bitten who isn’t a super Mage?” Dean asked, looking around worriedly.

Jimmy and Charlie both shook their heads. “It was close though,” Charlie admitted. “I now understand why you objected to having bare arms and legs in this costume,” she told Dean. “The bastards definitely tried to zero in on my unprotected skin but at least I’ve got a level 24 mana shield…oooh…. Make that a level 25,” she said, with a squeal of happiness as she realised she had levelled up at some point during the fight. “How’s your level?” she asked Dean.

“Twelve now,” he confirmed, grinning his satisfaction. “Even though I’m only getting 10% of the War Party XP, as the lowest level member, it’s still almost doubling the rate I can collect experience on my own. 10% stacks up quickly when Ash and Jimmy are slaughtering so many of these things.”

“There were 30 hellhounds,” Jimmy said, “but 60 of the skinwalkers. Do we assume there will be 90 mobs in level 3?”

“Dunno,” Dean said. “My gut tells me they’re more likely to mix it up and throw something completely different at us next time.”

“Is your gut frequently correct in its assumptions?” Jimmy asked, completely seriously.

Ash laughed. “Dean’s instincts are legendary,” he said. “Somehow he always seems to know where things like hidden trapdoors are. Definitely saved my butt a few times in the past. Like I said, don’t let his current level fool you. He’s an experienced player just temporarily stuck inside an unimpressive avatar.”

“Hey,” Dean protested. “My avatar is awesome. It’s just my character level that sucks.”

“I would concur,” Jimmy said, glancing at Dean appraisingly.

Dean blushed and dropped his gaze from the other player. He couldn’t tell whether Jimmy had been agreeing he looked awesome or just agreeing his character level was shit.

“I would suggest going through ahead of the rest of you to scope out the next level but, dunno if you noticed but…” Ash said.

“The door closed and sealed behind us last time,” Charlie interrupted. “The door only opened again after we killed the last mob. The dungeon is definitely preventing retreat from an active level so it’s probable if you go through on your own, you won’t be able to return to us.”

Ash nodded his agreement. “Yeah, I think if we split up we won’t be able to regroup until the level is cleared. The offer is still open for just me and Jimmy to go through,” he added, glancing at Jimmy to check he was agreeing.

“All for one and one for all,” Dean replied firmly, rising to his feet and heading towards the next doorway. “We’ll go through together. I mean, it’s level three right? How bad can it be?”

“I really wish you’d stop saying things like that,” Jimmy murmured as they stepped into the next room.

“Shit,” Dean spat. “I fucking hate rock ogres.”

…

Dean’s instincts that the dungeon would ‘mix it up’ proved to be correct. Level four also contained rock ogres but five of them rather than three. They were still relatively weak examples of their species but that only meant they had a _mere _800 HP each, so taking them down took the four players over an hour. Ash and Jimmy came out of that fight with barely a scratch. Both Dean and Charlie, however, came out of that level with severely depleted HP.

Charlie had been struck so hard by one of the ogres that she’d been dashed against a stone wall, breaking her right arm and fracturing her right cheekbone. It was, she said, the first time she'd actually felt glad not to be in her bespoke avatar since using Ash's rig meant she felt only 70% or so of the pain.

Dean had fared fractionally better, coming out of the fight with just cuts and bruises, but some of the cuts were severe ones and several of the bruises were bone deep. He had dropped almost as much HP as Charlie. Plus he felt 100% of the pain, so he thought Charlie had clearly gotten the better end of the deal.

Ash had expended a couple of his limited supply of healing potions. The vials healed each of them for 40% of their damage but, even so, they both were still limping, battered and sore as they made their way to level 5.

The rest of their health was regenerating by itself, their skin and bones slowly knitting back together, but they had no time to rest because the countdown was ticking and they were still working their way through temple guards which indicated they still had several levels to go before facing the Boss.

Level five held only two mobs, but they were both Wendigos with over 1250 HP each and since they proved to be impervious to anything except Ash’s fireballs, Dean and Charlie finally accepted their companions’ urging for them to just sit, rest and recover more HP. Jimmy was unable to land any critical blows to the beasts, since they swiftly regenerated their HP if struck by any weapon that wasn’t fire-based. But his speed and strength still proved crucial to Ash’s success. His continual harrying of the mobs proved sufficient distraction for Ash to momentarily pause fighting long enough to cast a spell that increased the power and range of his fiery projectiles enough to immolate the creatures.

Unfortunately, that meant Jimmy was also singed rather badly since he was caught in the fireball’s explosion and his gear only had 75% fire-resistance. He dropped 80 HP, almost 15%, and since his regen rate was only 5% per hour, he was inevitably going to spend the rest of the dungeon run with a partial injury debuff unless Ash could heal him.

He waved off Ash’s offer of a healing potion, though, telling him to save them in case Charlie and Dean needed to be healed again.

Between the rock ogres and the War Party share of the Wendigo XP, Charlie’s experience bar had moved quarter of the way towards level 26. Dean had already hit level 13 though, since the XP needed for his level up was quarter the amount required for a level up between 25 and 26.

Even so, a quick analysis between his stats and hers confirmed that, in real terms, at level 13 he had actually overtaken her in strength. He had the points equivalent now of a level 26 player, even though his public profile failed to display that fact. Why that was particularly relevant (hence the reason for him double-checking) was that they were regenerating at roughly the same rate.

Not that he really thought their healing rate was going to make much difference at this stage of the dungeon. Neither he nor Charlie had been able to fight at all against the Wendigos and the problem hadn’t really been their health bars. Sure, being injured didn’t help but the truth was they were simply totally out of their league in this dungeon run. 

“Exactly how good _are_ the rewards on offer for this Quest?” he grumbled, as they all headed for the sixth level.

“Considerably insufficient for the difficulty level we have encountered so far,” Jimmy replied, his tone somewhat disgruntled.

“Yeah,” Ash agreed. “The game mechanics here are pretty fucked up. Usually you can judge pretty accurately what you’re facing in a Quest because the risk/reward ratio in Moondoor is always completely consistent. But not today. Those Wendigos were of a strength that we shouldn’t have faced at all for a Quest of this type. Besides, nothing that strong should have appeared until the penultimate level of _any _dungeon, regardless of the rewards on offer, yet I highly doubt this door is going to lead us directly to the Boss. That wouldn’t fit with the narrative provided for this temple. So either the narrative is wrong or the mobs have been set too high. Either way, this whole scenario sucks.”

“You can say that again,” Charlie snarled, as they opened the door into the next level. “This is bullshit.”

“It’s…um…different,” Dean allowed.

“Woah, kind of creepy,” Ash said. “In a creepy uncle you really wish you weren’t related to kind of way.”

“Maybe they were trying for a Leia vibe?” Dean suggested, generously.

“They missed,” Charlie retorted. “That’s less Leia and more non-consensual BDSM.”

“I assume the challenge presented by this level is to rescue the rather underdressed lady dangling from those chains before she is impaled?” Jimmy suggested awkwardly.

“That’s no lady,” Dean snorted.

Charlie rounded on him angrily. “Don’t be a sexist asshole.”

“Like whoever programmed this whole scenario you mean?” he replied calmly. 

She huffed angrily. “No-one on my team would ever program deviant shit like this into Moondoor.”

“It certainly appears at odds with the normal scenarios of the game,” Jimmy agreed. 

“The fangs on that Jabba-type mob are pretty nasty,” Ash said, absently.

“You’re looking at its _fangs_?” Dean asked.

“Trying to distract myself from the obvious,” Ash muttered.

“Is it working?”

“Nope. Can’t _unsee _the rest of it.”

“So, given that this scene is sick shit that Charlie and her team didn’t program into the game, who created it?” Dean asked. “Can’t see this being Chuck’s kind of thing.”

“You’d be surprised,” Loki snickered.

“_Really_?”

“Nope. Just yanking your chain.”

“Does it really matter who wrote this?” Charlie demanded. “We need to rescue her before… well…jeez… I feel sick just thinking about it. “

“Those chains are definitely lowering her incrementally towards the waiting creature,” Jimmy said, choosing his words with delicacy. “I do believe there is a time factor here for us to consider.”

“So do we split up? Jimmy and me against the ‘thing’ whilst you and Dean try to get her down?” Ash asked Charlie.

Dean coughed loudly until they all turned towards him. “We do nothing,” he said. “Just let it happen.”

“WHAT?” Charlie howled.

“I have analysed the lady in question and she is registering as a player, not an NPC,” Jimmy said, “I do not believe we can fail to offer assistance.”

Dean shrugged. “It’s a fake set up. If that was really a player she would have logged out already. It’s a trap.”

“A trap,” Ash repeated slowly.

“A trap,” Dean repeated firmly.

Ash shrugged. “Okay,” he agreed.

“You’re just going to listen to him?” Charlie demanded angrily.

“Like I said before, Dean’s got good instincts. If he says it’s a trap, I believe him,” Ash replied.

Jimmy looked at them uncertainly for a moment, then sheathed his sword significantly.

Charlie stared at the three of them furiously for a few moments then visibly deflated. “Yeah, okay. You’re right, it does stink like a trap.”

They were rewarded by a slow, sarcastic clapping. Turning to find the source of the sound they witnessed the ‘lady’ now unfurling from the chains and lowering herself easily to the ground, a sneer on her face, “Fine, you want to do this the hard way?” she snarled. “That’s okay with me.”

“What are you?” Jimmy asked her, his tone polite. “Clearly not a player character, despite my S.I. stating you are one.”

“Me?” she asked, faking surprise. “Why, I do believe I am probably your worst nightmare.”

Her eyes flashed and then turned a solid, menacing black.

Immediately, the S.I’s of all four players flashed the words:

*** LEVEL 50 DEMON ***

“What the fuck?” Dean exclaimed, jumping back in shock.

“Why is there a ‘Demon’ in Moondoor?” Jimmy asked, his total confusion palpable. “I have never encountered one before.”

“It’s a new game setting,” Charlie told him hurriedly, deciding it was too late to be coy about it. “It’s not public knowledge yet but, yeah, demons are a 'thing' now.”

“I thought demons could only be summoned by players though,” Dean pointed out. “That’s what you told me right at the beginning of all this. Remember?”

Charlie nodded her agreement. “They can,” she said. “They can’t exist in the game at all unless summoned. I know there are weird things happening in the game that I can’t explain but I know for certain the demonic limitations are set in stone. I’ve seen _that_ code with my own eyes. If this woman is a demon, a player _must_ have summoned her.”

“And, presumably, the rest of them too?” Ash asked, pointedly, as more black-eyed demons emerged from the shadowy edges of the room to surround them.

“_What the fuck is going on_?” Dean demanded furiously.

“I’m just checking something,” Loki replied distractedly. “Hang on.”

“Is there a protocol for fighting demonic characters?” Jimmy asked, quietly.

“Holy water, crucifixes maybe… that kind of shit,” Ash replied.

“I do not believe any of us have those items in our inventories,” Jimmy replied.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Dean muttered.

“I’ve got it,” Loki yelled suddenly, causing Dean to start in surprise. “Looks like one of the other Knights hit level 15 yesterday and got out of purgatory. I think he’s the ‘boss’ you’re supposed to be ganking here today.”

“_Why would a Knight dedicate a temple to the Dark Goddess_?” Dean argued.

“I don’t think he did,” Loki replied thoughtfully. “I think that’s just the way the meta data misinterpreted the reason for the Temple going ‘dark’.”

Dean thought furiously. If this really was a case of a Knight escaping purgatory within a week, then it stood to reason he’d done so by killing a hell of a lot of monsters to level himself up. If he’d done so by using his Crude Bone Dagger, he would have built up a huge stash of Soul Points. Presumably, he’d arrived in Moondoor and immediately used that SP to summon these demons but why? Why summon demons when there had been no target to aim them at?

“Maybe just to find out what they do,” Loki suggested. “Makes sense he’d want to trial them out before depending on them in a critical situation.”

“_So he deliberately chose this setting, this Temple, so the system would alert the R10’s of all the Guilds that there was a potential Quest here_?”

“I think so,” Loki said. “I think he’s just looking for some random high level players to test the demons against.”

“_He’s not specifically targeting_ me?”

“Don’t see how he could be,” Loki replied. “For one thing, he’d have no way of knowing you’d left Purgatory already. Besides, if he was after _you_ he wouldn’t have set up a trap for high level players, would he?”

“_So as far as he knows, I’m just a normal newbie_?”

“Yup.”

Okay, Dean decided. He could probably use that to his advantage. Always assuming any of them survived the monkeys long enough to meet the actual organ grinder.

“_Any idea which Knight got out early_?” he asked Loki.

“He apparently calls himself Crowley.”


	33. J'adoube

At a mere 9 stories high, the building that housed Woolf, Roman, Van Dueran LLP barely registered on the city skyline but its opulent modern architectural design still turned the heads of all who passed by its gleaming glass and chrome exterior.

That design scheme flowed through its interior. White and black marble tiles covering its floors and walls, glass and chrome desks, flat screen monitors, black leather cube seats; black ash furniture and, here and there, graphic art pieces in similar monochromatic style.

So Sam always found it peculiar when he stumbled upon areas within the building that portrayed such a radically different design that he had the sensation of entering a completely separate pocket dimension.

The archive in the lower basement was a perfect example. Although the archive was no older than the achingly modern building that rose above it, entering it was like being transported into a fusty Victorian-era library. The archive was somehow both ancient and timeless; much like the Archivist himself.

And whilst the lobby area of the ninth floor, the domain of the Partners, was a wide expanse of white marble, black leather and severe geometric lines in keeping with the lower office floors, entering the office of Nigel Roman was eerily like being transported to Dickensian England.

Oak panelled walls, floor to ceiling bookcases filled with leather-bound tomes, Chesterfield Sofas, a huge antique roll topped desk upon which a computer monitor perched as incongruously as an alien invader and in the centre of the room, in clear pride of place, a heavy oak table holding a vintage carved bone chess set in the Staunton design, the pieces of which appeared to have been left mid game.

Sam took a brief glance at the board, then paused, and then visibly winced, before returning his attention where it belonged as Nigel Roman rose from behind his desk to greet him with a handshake. Although the gesture was more perfunctory than sincere, Sam still appreciated the courtesy. 

“You play?” Nigel asked, confirming he’d noticed Sam’s brief distraction.

“A little,” Sam dissembled, though he had been a passionate tournament player for the Stanford Chess Club. He expected that little snippet was probably mentioned in his personnel file but a little show of humility never hurt.

“What do you think my next move should be?” the older man asked, confirming Sam’s suspicion Nigel _did_ already know he played the game like a Master.

“You’re playing black, Sir?” Sam asked, though he was pretty sure of the answer since if it were the turn of white the game would probably already be over.

Nigel nodded.

“Sacrifice your knight on f4 and instead move your rook to b8,” Sam suggested confidently.

Nigel frowned doubtfully, playing the move out in his head, contemplating the counter-measures of his opponent, visualizing the most likely subsequent series of moves on the board should he accept Sam’s advice, then his eyes widened in surprise. “It might work,” he cackled. “Damnit, it actually might. Bastard won’t be expecting that. His whole current game plan is based on him thinking I’ll defend that knight, isn’t it?”

“From the positioning of his pieces, there appears to be clear expectation you will do so,” Sam agreed.

“He knows me too well,” Nigel sighed. “We’ve been playing together far too long and I _never_ win,” he confessed. Then he grinned self-depreciatingly. “I was definitely intending to defend my knight,” he admitted. “I’ve never been good at the subtle approach. I _know _Chess is a game of strategy, that I need to be proactive rather than reactive, but I’m afraid I continually allow myself to be provoked into dumbly charging in like a bull at a gate.”

“Perhaps you should try a different game,” Sam suggested carefully. “One more suited to your strengths?”

“Ahh,” Nigel sighed. “Unfortunately I find myself unable to fold. Not because my hubris exceeds my ability but because, frankly, I don’t want to give the bugger the satisfaction. Better to lose skirmish after skirmish than ever give up and declare the war entirely lost.”

“Pride is always a powerful motivator,” Sam agreed easily. He kept his expression a careful mix of deference and defiance. He needed Nigel to see him as clever but unthreatening. Although he needed to press for some answers, not to mention a possible personal introduction or recommendation to Woolfe, he wanted the older man to find his persistence to be merely an almost amusing display of the misguided ambition of youth. Sam was only here to check the state of the board, not move any pieces into play.

"J'adoube," he whispered under his breath, then said, “Was that why you chose to fight the GhostFacer case rather than simply redirect the litigants away from our Clients to the Government instead?” He deliberately blurted the words, as though they had burst out of him by their own accord. Then he ducked his head as though embarrassed by his own outburst.

Nigel blinked at him in mild surprise at the rudeness of the sudden conversational detour but still gave him the courtesy of a considered reply.

“I confess a certain degree of my motivation was personal irritation. In similar cases the Government have been frequently guilty of not even bothering to fight the case. They simply settle the matter immediately with an offer of compensation for the use of the patent. That offends me on a basic level since the Government does not _own_ money. It merely acts as a caretaker of _our _money. As taxpayers, we should expect the custodians of our money to be more cautious when dispensing it.”

Sam nodded his agreement of the older man’s point. “The GhostFacers do, however, appear to have a legally valid claim to the Patent,” he said, his expression apologetic. “So on the surface it appears to have been an unnecessary risk to have taken.”

“The client wished me to defend. It was their position that should the litigants find themselves unable to gain a monetary advantage from holding that patent, they might be persuaded to sell ownership of it. The litigants declined the offer at the time but it is possible this letter is designed to re-open negotiations towards a sale.”

It was Sam’s turn to look surprised. “RRE are willing to buy the patent outright but not to simply pay compensation for its use?”

“It’s a matter of control,” Nigel explained. “The former is a single one-off transaction. The monetary consideration of such a transaction can be fully quantified. The latter is a noose around their neck. The word blackmail would be harsh but, essentially, once it is established that RRE require a licence to utilize the patent, the patent-holders would forever be left in a position of considerable influence over the Company’s future.”

Sam made a show of considering that point carefully before saying, “So if the Government had been allowed to pay compensation at the time, that would have validated the litigant’s ownership of the patent making all further use of it subject to license agreements.”

“Exactly,” Nigel beamed, smiling at Sam as though he was a particularly pleasing pupil.

“So RRE knew, even when they were using the patent purely for the Government contract they were fulfilling at the time, that they would wish to use the patent themselves at a later date? That’s why they wanted you to get the claim dismissed altogether?”

“RRE were already working on a conceptual design for utilizing the patent within their own virtual reality tanks,” Nigel agreed. “Though don’t ask me the technical details. I find the whole subject of digital technology completely bewildering. I honestly can’t understand how a patent for a military application can possibly be used as a crucial component for a mere _game_.”

“The original patent holder actually designed his product as a _medical training _tool though, didn’t he?” Sam asked. “The technology he was envisaging could have even become a viable alternative to a CAT scan; one that would have completely avoided the use of X-rays.”

“It was a matter of timing, I believe,” Nigel replied. “This patent was originally filed shortly after the majority of manufacturers had committed a great deal of money to the development of MRI’s as the alternate option to CAT’s. No-one was willing to effectively throw that money away by pursuing a third option. Particularly one so morally questionable. The technology was of great interest to the government, however, who could see a practical military application. They contracted RRE to develop the concept for them since RRE were already manufacturing immersion tanks for gaming.”

Sam nodded his understanding. The patent in question had allowed RRE to develop their tanks to a point where a player using one now had a totally seamless, 100% realistic immersion into a virtual world.

He had done a lot of investigation into the design of the tanks ever since his impulsive older brother had signed a contract to practically _live_ inside one of them. The rigs they were now calling ‘Generation Nine’ hadn’t even been created for players at all. They had actually been developed to train military personnel. They were a way for soldiers to fight and even die in realistic battle situations without any risk to their physical bodies.

But the patent of the technological breakthrough that made such a fundamental difference to the ‘realism’ of 9th generation tanks over its predecessors had originally been for a device to enable doctors to map the progression of a physical disease within a controlled virtual environment. A digital avatar could be seeded by a virtual intelligence created to mimic a real patient’s own physical reactions, behaviours and thought processes. Then, utilitizing the ability to manipulate time within the virtual world, doctors could trial a series of potential treatments, testing the effectiveness of each. The doctors could even repeatedly ‘kill’ the ‘patient’ and even perform autopsies and vivisections to help them narrow down the precise cause of the disease and its rate of progression.

In some cancers, for instance, where for a cure to be fully effective it needed to be designed to specifically target a patient’s individual DNA. In real life, by the time those individualised treatments could be perfected, it was frequently too late to save the patient they had been created for. In a virtual environment, that process could be sped up exponentially and new iterations of the treatment could be tested repeatedly for effectiveness with no worries that a kill-or-cure application of a previously untested treatment would do any permanent real life harm.

As a diagnostic, testing and training tool the concept was brilliant. It was, however, disturbing on a number of moral levels. Whilst no-one was concerned about the idea of utilitizing digital characters in such a way, since it was only ‘hurting’ a make-believe ‘person’, there was a great deal of concern over the long-term effect on the mental health of medical practitioners performing such procedures in such a realistic virtual environment.

No one, though, had seemed to find any moral objection to using the exact same technology to teach soldiers to be more effective killers.

“Am I correct in my belief the Government are no longer purchasing these units from RRE?” Sam asked.

Nigel frowned at him. “Why do you ask?”

“Because the most appropriate response to this latest query from the Patent holders would probably depend on whether the Government might still be called upon as defendants in any future court case,” Sam replied, his expression neutral, though what he really wanted to know was whether the Government had stopped using the tanks because they had proven to be dangerous. There was no way of asking the question without showing his hand, though, and he doubted Nigel would know the answer anyway.

“My understanding is the current administration have made the decision to discontinue the use of such VR for military applications because of budgetary reasons. RRE are now investigating a different use of the technology in medical applications but, most importantly, the patent is now purely being used by a private company so, to answer your question, there is no current Government interest in this case.”

“What medical applications?” Sam asked, his tone one of casual interest.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Nigel replied, mildly irritated by the question. “If you are working under the misapprehension that I have superior knowledge of the situation, you’re sadly mistaken. I have very limited contact with my son and therefore no insider knowledge of RRE’s business decisions.”

Sam activated his wide puppy eyes. “That’s really sad,” he said. “I know you are both busy men but I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’d give for just one more day with _my _father. It breaks my heart that he’ll never be able to witness the progression of my career. I so wanted to make him proud of me,” he choked a little on the words, though not for the reason Nigel imagined.

Nigel looked at him uncomfortably, as he recalled the detailed file he’d read on Sam Winchester before their meeting. He had noticed the ‘parents deceased’ notation but hadn’t paid more than cursory attention to it. Now, looking at the man, well, over-grown _boy_ in his office who was trying so hard not to look like a puppy begging for scraps as he tried, not very successfully, to steal a case off a senior partner, Nigel felt an unexpected surge of affection for the big, clumsy lummox.

As much as he’d never understood his son, he _had_ loved him very much. It was a source of deep hurt both to himself and his wife, Henrietta, that they’d barely had any contact with Richard for a number of years. Since the conception of RRE, it was almost as though his son had become a totally different person. He’d always been distracted and difficult to engage in conversation but he had at least appeared to genuinely _care_ about his parents. But somewhere along the line something had changed. These days, Richard didn’t even care enough to _pretend_ any interest in his family.

If not for the occasional snippets of gossip he acquired from his regular Chess games with Richard’s long-standing Auditor, Charles Shurley, Nigel was pretty sure his only communication with his son would be the odd email and receipt of his dutiful Christmas and Birthday cards. Cards that Richard didn’t even personally sign.

“There will be no necessity for you to send a reply to the litigant at all,” Nigel told Sam firmly. “I will pass the inquiry to the Client and ask whether they wish to revisit the idea of purchasing the patent outright.”

Sam’s face fell and his shoulders slumped with clear disappointment.

Nigel cleared his throat a little. “I am surprised by your continued interest in the matter,” he continued. “Your personnel file gives no indication that this is an area of Law you wish to pursue.”

The boy’s face flushed with obvious embarrassment and he shifted from foot to foot, looking like his hand had been caught in a cookie jar. “It isn’t really,” he confessed, his voice small. “I just, well, to be perfectly honest I… um…”

“Saw this as an excuse to finally enter the hallowed ninth floor?” Nigel interrupted, his voice not unkind.

Still blushing, the boy looked up and bravely met his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry, Sir. I just hoped I might get a chance to do something impressive that might get Mr. Woolfe to notice me.”

Nigel chuckled, feeling surprisingly paternal towards the young whippersnapper. A little ambition in a young man wasn’t a bad thing.

If only his son, Richard, had shared this boy’s love of the Law maybe they wouldn’t have grown so far apart. Either way, Richard clearly didn’t share this boy’s wish to make his father proud.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that, Mr. Winchester,” he reassured him kindly. “I am sure you will reach his attention in due time.”

As the young man made his retreat from Nigel’s office, the older man stared after him with an almost fond expression on his face. Maybe he would make a point of dropping a kind word in about the young upstart when he next bumped into Donald.

He composed a quick letter to RRE, advising them the GhostFacers were potentially open to negotiation, then turned his attention to the chessboard where, with a chuckle, he took young Winchester’s advice, abandoned his knight to fate and instead moved his rook to b8.

Then he smirked as he imagined the look of surprise on the Auditor’s face when he next visited.


	34. Castiel

“There’s nothing more I can do,” Ash gasped, as he staggered back under the assault of the swarming demons. 

The creatures all appeared to have over 80% magic resistance, making every spell he had cast virtually useless against them. He was now sending wave after wave of mana-infused fireballs at them, the only spells that had _any_ significant effect, but the demons’ health bars were dropping far slower than his own mana reserves. It was just a matter of time before he would be fully drained and that would happen long before any more of the demons were reduced to a critical level.

His efforts hadn’t been totally in vain, though.

It seemed the demons were vulnerable to standard weapons too, although even Jimmy’s powerful strikes were barely scratching the surface of the demon’s HP. Still, between repeated applications of his scything blade and Ash’s fireballs, they _had_ eventually dropped seven of the demons down to such critical health levels that they had become weak enough for Dean and Charlie to finish off.

But there were still almost a dozen remaining, plus the female level 50 demon who hadn’t even entered the melee at all. She was just watching the brawl with an expression of sneering boredom, waiting for her troops to overwhelm the players completely.

It didn’t take much longer.

All four players found themselves disarmed, with Ash so low on mana he couldn’t have even lit a joint, let alone raised another fireball. His mana was regenerating, of course, but it would take at least an hour to raise it to a useable level again. 

“Should we log out?” Ash asked quietly, as he faced the totally unfamiliar sensation of having his hands bound behind his back by the victorious demons.

“Not yet,” Charlie spat, though she yelped involuntarily as her own arms were similarly shackled. Her right arm was still knitting itself together from the earlier break and the rough handling by the demons sent jolts of agony down her entire right side.

“What do you think, Dean?” Ash asked cautiously. “We can log out, heal up and try again later. Now we know what we’re facing, we could prepare better for a second run.”

“We don’t have time to regenerate then re-run the dungeon from scratch,” Dean replied. “We have to complete the Quest before sunset today, remember?”

“Dean is correct. The only way to restart immediately with a fully recharged avatar is if we are killed in-game,” Jimmy agreed. “Despite the death debuffs we would suffer, we would still have considerably more chance of completing the Quest within the allotted timescale if we die rather than accept defeat.”

“Which is exactly why we aren’t planning on killing you…yet,” the level 50 Demon purred, stepping forward with a sly, victorious grin on her incongruously pretty face. “The Boss told us not to kill you. He didn’t say we couldn’t have a little fun, though.”

She withdrew a long, wicked-looking knife from her belt, raised it to her face and licked its blade lasciviously. Then she tossed her hair back from her face and waggled the index finger of her other hand between the four players. “Let’s see,” she said. “Which one of you shall I start with? Hmmmm. What’s going to be more satisfying? Do I start with the big guns here? See how long it takes to cut some of your arrogance out of you before you give up and go running home to Mommy?”

She stepped towards Ash, smiled at his furious expression, then plunged her knife without warning into his left side.

Ash grunted, staggering from the pain of the blow as blood began to pool around the embedded blade, but he didn’t cry out. Instead, he hawked a wad of spit into the demoness’s face. “Fuck off, bitch,” he snarled.

Her pretty face contorted with anger as the spittle ran down her cheek. “The name’s Meg, actually,” she said, deliberately twisting the blade in Ash’s body until he paled with agony. He still clenched his jaw and refused to give her the satisfaction of voicing his pain, though.

Impatient and furious, Meg yanked the blade out of him and turned to the other three players. “Let’s see how stoic you are when I start carving Red’s tits off her body,” she mocked. “Or maybe I’ll see what your little boyfriend looks like when I cut off his nose…though… oooh… maybe I should cut a bit lower. Nice big package you’re packing there, pretty boy.”

Dean gulped heavily as the demon’s black eyes roamed over his lower body with clear, evil intent.

“Uh, oh,” Loki said. “Looks like you’re going to be singing soprano if you don’t do something quick, Deano.”

“_What exactly do you want me to do?” _Dean spat.

“Well, if you don’t want to be Moondoor’s first Castrati, and you aren’t planning to log out, I think you need to go with plan B.”

“_I have a plan B_?”

“As dumb as he is pretty,” Loki sighed. “Um, hello, she’s a demon. She gets paid in SP, doesn’t she? Don’t know how much SP Crowley had to be able to summon so many demons at once but it stands to reason he didn’t gain an infinite amount in less than a week, regardless of how murderous he was in Purgatory. So you probably now have more in your inventory than he has left unspent in his own. You could maybe try to take control of the bitch with your own SP. Can’t imagine demons have any concept of loyalty.”

It made sense, Dean, decided. He probably _did_ own enough SP to bribe Meg to change sides.

“I initially presumed you were a being of considerable power,” Jimmy interrupted, just as Meg’s knife lowered towards Dean’s groin. “I was obviously mistaken. No mob of any significance would bother with a noob like _him_,” he scoffed. “Are you seriously so pathetically weak that you can only attack a Level 14?”

Meg’s attention snapped to Jimmy, her head whipping around snake-like to glower at the Level 64 player in offended wrath.

“_I leveled up again_?” Dean asked Loki.

“Focus, Dean,” Loki suggested, with a put-upon sigh.

“_I am_,” Dean retorted as he stared at Jimmy, impressed with the player’s bravery in pulling the demon’s attention to himself. “_But I think I’m gonna go with plan C_.”

“What’s plan C?”

But it was Jimmy who answered.

As soon as Meg’s knife found a home in Jimmy’s belly, its sharp edges slicing through his skin and burying itself deep in his guts, Jimmy’s face contorted. But it was with confusion, rather than pain, his eyes widening with shock and his slack-jawed expression one of complete bewilderment.

“Um, Dean,” he said, hesitantly, completely ignoring the demon who was now starting to saw savagely at his flesh. “You… um… my S.I. says… um…”

“I know,” Dean interrupted, because he had suddenly understood exactly what he had to do. He checked his inventory quickly, grinned with satisfaction at its contents and shouted “Help me, Jimiel. I am _PRAYING_ to you for help.”

Several things happened at once.

Almost a third of Dean’s hard-earned Faith Points disappeared from his inventory.

Jimmy’s eyes flashed and turned a brilliant, pulsing electric blue.

There was a crashing sound of breaking metal as the chains that bound Jimmy broke apart in an explosion of shrapnel that pierced the flesh of several of the demons but somehow, _miraculously_, missed the bodies of his far closer companions.

And all the dark demonic shadows of the room coalesced together, streaming towards Jimmy’s body like a tsunami but, instead of striking him, they parted into two and rose to form huge black shadow wings that stretched out from his shoulders, their tips touching the edges of the now brightly lit room.

All around the players the lesser demons were shrieking and smoking, their flesh bubbling and dissolving as the holy light seemed to work like acid on their skin.

Only Meg seemed unaffected by the light. Her form remained unharmed by its exposure to the sudden brightness of the room but her previous sneering confidence had been replaced by an expression of obvious, if still angry, fear.

“What the fuck are you?” she demanded, as all around her the lesser demons collapsed to the floor, transformed into puddles of black gunk that slowly seeped away through the cracks in the floor tiles.

“I am an Angel of the Lord God Chuck.” The voice was impossibly deep, emerging from Jimmy’s mouth with a resonance that literally caused the surrounding walls to crack and splinter.

*** Castiel, Angel of Chuck, Level 250 ***

“_Level what_?” Dean gulped. “_Two-frigging-fifty_?”

“Dad doesn’t mess about,” Loki agreed. “Nice to finally know who’s riding Jimmy, though. I was worried it was going to be one of the Arch-fucktards. Cassie’s okay. Bit of a boring douche but heart’s in the right place. Actually, Jimmy kind of reminds me of him… Odd… think it’s a chicken and egg kind of thing? I mean, was Cassie drawn to Jimmy because they are similar or is Jimmy boring because Cassie’s riding him too hard?”

“_Like you say, Loki. Focus. ‘Sides, Jimmy isn’t boring_.”

“Well, fuck off, Clarence,” Meg spat. “I’ve got a job to do here, so get your pretty butt out of my business.”

Castiel’s head tipped to the side in vague confusion, the gesture so Jimmy-like that Dean momentarily asked himself the same question as Loki had, “My name is not ‘Clarence’,” the Angel told the demon, in his deep, ponderous voice. “It is Castiel. And, this _is _my business. I must ask you to vacate this scenario and return from whence you came,” he said, his tone politely apologetic.

Meg’s black eyes stared at him in unblinking astonishment for a moment.

Then she said, “Kiss my ass, Clarence.”

As the two beings continued their peculiar stand-off, Dean took the opportunity to summon Benny from his inventory. The vampire made quick work of removing the shackles binding the three players.

“This is fucking awesome,” Charlie said, as she rubbed her arm to ease its ache. “You’ve got a pocket monster _and _a pet _Angel_?”

Then she gulped as Castiel broke his staring contest with Meg and flashed her a repressive glare from his eerie, shining, electric-blue eyes. She made a quick gesture of appeasement, “Okay, you’re _SO_ not a pet,” she said, hurriedly. “Sorry, Mr. BadAss Angel guy.”

“Um, we still have a Boss to gank,” Dean told the Angel, with an apologetic shrug, “and time’s ticking so, um, could you get on with it already?”

“Woah, not cool,” Ash muttered nervously, backing away from Dean a little as though in fear he’d get caught in the cross-fire if the level 250 Angel took offense.

Which he clearly did, since he turned to face Dean with a glower and rumbled, “You should show me some respect,” in a voice that literally caused the ground under their feet to crack and shift.

But, as he turned, he waved a hand, almost absently, towards the demoness and sent a pulsing wave of blue-tinged fire in her direction. The bright light hit her for 100% damage, smiting her instantly into a puddle of black liquid.

“Fucking-A,” Ash gulped, as *** Level Cleared *** immediately flashed on his S.I.

“Um, yeah, thanks,” Dean told the terrifyingly powerful being, rubbing his neck awkwardly.

“She just went poof,” Charlie said. “Awesome. Bet he can take Crowley out with his little finger too. Let’s go gank the Boss guy.”

The three of them, plus Benny, stepped towards the final dungeon door.

The Angel didn’t follow.

They stopped in confusion, looking back at the implacable creature.

“Um, the Boss guy is that way?” Dean suggested, waving at the door.

“You have insufficient faith points,” the Angel rumbled, his expression cold. “No further assistance will be provided at this time.”

“Bummer,” Ash pouted.

“Hang on,” Dean protested, checking his inventory. “I still have over 500 FP,” he argued. “Summoning you for this level only cost 240. What fucking rate of inflation are you applying here?”

Even if it cost _double _to gain assistance for the next level, he still had enough to purchase the angelic aid.

“You are no longer Righteous,” the Angel intoned implacably. “No further assistance will be provided at this time.”

Instantly, the blue energy pulsing in his eyes faded, the shadow wings dissolved, the room was plunged back to near darkness and only a confused Jimmy was left, staggering slightly, where the Angel had previously existed.

“What the fuck?” Dean exclaimed.

“You’re in negative balance,” Loki explained. “You currently have 5 more SP in your inventory than you have FP.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dean swore. “You fucking asshole,” he snarled at the Angel. “5 fucking points?”

Since it was Jimmy now who was the unfortunate subject of his ire, the level 64 player blinked uncertainly in the face of Dean’s anger, rubbing his forehead as though he had a headache as he asked, “Where did all the demons go?”

Dean frowned at him uncertainly. “Um… do you remember telling me to pray to you?” he prompted.

“Pray to me?” Jimmy repeated incredulously. “Am I failing to comprehend humorous intercourse again?”

“He said intercourse,” Loki snickered.

“_Grow up_,” Dean snapped.

“You don’t remember anything?” Charlie asked Jimmy urgently. “You don’t remember going all ‘smitey’?”

“That’s not a word,” Ash argued.

“It IS so a word,” she bit back.

“I seem to have experienced a major S.I. glitch,” Jimmy said, worriedly. “I have no in-game memory of the last several minutes. I really think I should log out and purchase a different avatar.”

“Don’t you dare,” Dean yelped.

“Why not?” Jimmy asked reasonably.

“I um… because, um, I really like the one you’re wearing?” Dean suggested weakly.

Jimmy flushed. “Thank you,” he said, shuffling awkwardly, “but I still think…”

“I think we need to tell Jimmy the truth,” Charlie said firmly.

“About what?” Jimmy demanded.

“Um, guys,” Dean said, gesturing at the waiting door. “Maybe we could sort this out later? I think we need to go handle Crowley first.”

Jimmy glared at him suspiciously but then sighed and deflated a little. “Very well,” he agreed, “But I most certainly will expect the ‘truth’ after this dungeon is completed.”

“_Loki?”_ Dean demanded urgently. “_Is it safe? Can I tell him_?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘safe’,” Loki replied. “But chances are that now it’s been proven Jimmy’s a suitable vessel for seeding, even if he gets a new avatar he’ll just end up getting seeded _again_. And the next V.I. might be a hell of a lot worse than Castiel.”

“_Really_?” Dean sneered, with disbelief. “_Because I’m finding it hard to imagine a bigger douchebag myself. Five fucking points. What a complete DICK_.”

“Cassie’s a good ‘soldier’ so he’s bit of a stickler for the rules,” Loki explained. “Chuck is very rigid about keeping precisely balanced ledgers. He doesn’t offer any wriggle room. It doesn’t matter if it’s five points or five thousand. A negative balance is a negative balance.”

“_Great, so god’s a fucking Accountant? Figures_,” Dean sneered.

Then he turned to Jimmy.

“When we get this Quest finished, I will tell you everything,” he promised gravely.

Jimmy looked at him searchingly for a moment, then nodded his acceptance. “Let’s go find the Boss then,” he agreed.


	35. A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Sue-Beth Johnson’s only claim to fame before 2007 was that she had once been Prom Queen.

Sadly for Sue-Beth, despite still being slender enough to totally rock her prom dress, she’d already skipped a couple of periods by the big day and so, only seven months after her graduation, she’d found herself pushing a stroller.

Danny Meenagh, Prom King, Quarterback, son of the local Chief of Police and guy who thought condoms were for losers, had been long gone by then. Hell, he hadn’t hung around more than a couple of days after hearing the news of his impending fatherhood. The Meenagh clan had spirited him away to college in another town and Sue-Beth had been left to raise their daughter alone.

A generation or two earlier, the ‘shame’ of being a single mother might have driven Sue-Beth to leave town herself. But there were more welfairies in town by then than there were respectably married mothers. So Sue-Beth plodded on through life, bringing her daughter up as best she could, shoring up the welfare checks with waitressing jobs.

By the time Mary-Sue was eight, Sue-Beth made the rent on their trailer-park home by working at Joe’s Pussy Emporium, a club that offered a sufficiently unique ‘service’ to draw regular out-of-town clientele to its doors. Sue-Beth resented working for Joe _Meenagh_, Danny’s brother, since she’d never forgiven the family for ostracizing both herself and her daughter, but it was a small town and job opportunities were limited. Fortunately, she at least worked as a waitress and cleaner there, rather than participating in less savory activities with patrons, and the money was a little better than working in a diner. The club had another benefit. In the basement, alongside its more traditional dungeon implements, it held three fully-equipped VR rigs that it rented out by the hour to patrons.

Sue-Beth was pretty certain none of those renters were visiting the same kind of virtual world that she herself frequented. Quite apart from anything else, it was rare the renters utilized the tanks for more than 30 or 40 minutes maximum before they re-emerged from the booths, fully satisfied. Which meant, of course, that the rigs were frequently left fully powered but vacant for 20-30 minutes at a time.

Sue-Beth always volunteered to clean those booths after they had been vacated. By the time the next user visited, they were always sparklingly clean with their bio-gel sanitized for reuse.

And Sue-Beth’s alter-ego, Queen Gold, would have managed to progress her character’s XP a little further. There was always additional satisfaction in knowing that she was doing so on electricity paid for by the Meenaghs.

Sue-Beth’s claim to fame in 2007 should have been that she was the first definitive ‘civilian’ victim of the ‘darkness’.

Her body was found inside one of the VR tanks. An autopsy found that she was a victim of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. It was, the coroner concluded, most likely she had been a sufferer of a previously undetected inherited heart disorder and that she had most likely simply expired ‘in her sleep’ in an adult version of ‘cot-death’.

Perhaps the coroner would have looked at her death more closely had he been made aware of the actual circumstances in which she died.

Joe Meenagh, however, keen to avoid any unwanted investigation of the club’s underground activities, arranged with his father, the Chief of Police, for the records to show Sue-Beth had been at home in bed when she died.

...

Hannah Carson was inconsolable.

Her husband, Gerald, held himself at least partly responsible for her distress. Perhaps if he hadn’t been so cavalier in his ‘investigations’ of the Church’s excessive power supply, he would have been aware of Pastor Jim’s unexpected hobby and would have thought to have checked in the basement himself when the Pastor had failed to turn up for Sunday’s evening service.

Since it was rare for more than a handful of people to attend the evening service, and the good Pastor had frequently been known to cancel it previously if one of the congregation had more pressing need of his personal attention, Gerald had initially dismissed his absence as being, most likely, a case of the Pastor simply forgetting to leave a message on the church door that he was going to be absent.

So it was perhaps Gerald’s fault that it had been his wife who had found the poor man’s body on Monday morning.

Such a terrible business.

Shocking.

Though, according to the town Doctor, the Pastor had been on blood pressure medication for years and his last three readings had been so abnormally high that the Doc had already made an appointment for Pastor Jim to attend the nearest hospital for an ECG.

With an existing diagnosis of heart problems, there was no mandatory requirement for an autopsy and the Sheriff was satisfied there was no foul play involved so, already feeling guilty, Gerald acceded to his wife’s request that the actual _details_ of Pastor Jim’s death were kept private.

The poor man had simply died of a heart attack.

And that was all anybody needed to know of the matter.

…

Park Chung-Hee, President of South Korea, was assassinated in 1979.

Prior to his death, the government had actively sponsored students to attend Western universities but the chaebol who employed the graduates on their return home (many of which were owned by officials within Park’s cabinet) were encouraged to consolidate their positions only within the boundaries of Korea, where those foreign-trained engineers were indispensable for the development of new, proprietary technologies for the advancement of _Korean_ interests.

After Park’s death, however, the government no longer afforded special privileges to the chaebol. Companies such as Lucky Chemical, Samsung, Daewoo and Goldstar Electronics were forced to look outwards for investment to Western Companies such as AT & T and Honeywell. In the wake of this, Lucky Chemical and Goldstar merged together to form Lucky-Goldstar and, in a bid to enter the global market, opened a television manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama in 1982.

In 1984, Jaron Lanier founded a company named VPL Research in Palo Alto. It was not only one of the first companies to sell VR products but also implemented a programming language to develop applications of VR such as the DataGlove and the EyePhone. In 1989 VPL contracted Lucky-Goldstar, later known as LG Electronics, to manufacture a number of advanced speculative prototypes of a virtual reality immersion tank.

In 1990, shortly before the contract was completed, VPL filed for bankruptcy and Lucky-Goldstar was left with a dozen finished prototypes and no customer to reimburse its considerable investment in the product. The political ramifications back home of making such a financial misstep would be considerable for the Korean company should they fail to somehow recoup their investment. 

With VPL’s demise, there was the potential to tear up the non-disclosure agreement they had signed which prevented them ‘stealing’ the design for their own purposes. Unfortunately, since their entire business model was based upon a concept of ‘Life is Good’ and their growing success in the international market was primarily based upon the development of their reputation as totally trustworthy manufacturers of products that always made their customers’ lives ‘better’, the immersion tanks were not something that Lucky-Goldstar wished to have their name associated with.

Lucky-Goldstar was far from convinced that the tanks it had manufactured on behalf of VPL would make anybody’s lives ‘better’. It had, in fact, a great number of concerns over both the safety of the tanks and their potential for misuse.

Fortunately for Lucky-Goldstar, a brand new company named RRE approached it and offered to discreetly purchase the prototypes.

Although the money RRE offered was less than the full amount LG had invested, it still enabled the latter to clear a large portion of the financial deficit caused by the collapse of VPL. More importantly, however, the deal passed all manufacturing and design responsibility to RRE. Lucky-Goldstar effectively wiped its hands of the product entirely.

With that transaction, RRE took physical ownership not only of the finished prototypes but also the original drawings and tooling for the tanks. With those, it was possible for RRE to contract the manufacture of further tanks themselves.

What RRE failed to acquire, because of the very nature of the events that had transpired, was any access to the original design process. Neither did RRE have access to any of the people who had been instrumental in taking Lanier’s original idea from concept to reality.

Richard Roman, with the hubris of youthful genius, was certain that would not prove to be an issue. He was supremely confident of his ability to fully reverse engineer the prototypes to fill the gaps in his understanding before he proceeded to not only use, but further develop, the tanks for the purpose of his original creation, ‘Moondoor’.

He was _almost_ successful.

…

Bobby Singer was the first person to describe himself as an ‘ornery old coot’.

He was unashamed of the description. On the contrary, he wore it like a badge of honor. He was, therefore, probably not the first person who would jump to mind to play the role of a Guild Master in Moondoor. He had no interest in ‘power’, per se, and even less interest in the nurturing of other players so he couldn’t even claim he had accepted the role to fulfill an innate urge to act as a mentor to those less experienced in the game.

But Bobby absolutely hated being told what to do. In _any_ aspect of his life.

So the real reason he was the R10 of the Hunter Guild was that it meant he was ‘the boss’. Better, in his opinion, to be the R10 of a tiny guild like the Hunters than hold any lower rank within a larger Guild.

Because, as a rule, people were idjits.

Bobby had no patience with any of them.

He often regretted getting involved with Moondoor altogether. He would have been far better off finding a hobby that didn’t necessitate regular interaction with other people. He certainly hadn’t started off with any intent to spend hours every day participating in a virtual world at all, let alone become responsible for an entire guild of people.

He’d actually found the game completely by accident. 

Everything about his life would probably have been completely different were it not for his wife’s untimely death. A couple of years after her passing, already developing a reputation as an antisocial asshole, Bobby had purchased the contents of a rented storage locker. The sale had been for the full contents of the locker, sight unseen, after the renter had failed to pay their rental fees. Bobby regularly purchased lockers, knowing the scrap value alone of the contents would often turn him a good profit. Now and then, though, the lockers contained items of such value that it beggared belief the owners of said items would allow them to end up at public auction for the sake of a few missed rental payments.

And it was one such item that had precipitated Bobby’s downfall.

He had, via a series of peculiar events, none of which are particularly relevant at this point of the story, somehow become the unwitting owner of a number of badly damaged VR immersion tanks. 

It should be said that his initial reaction, after his “what the hell?” moment, was to consider the scrap value of the metal should he simply smelt the things down. But curiosity had eventually won out. He had decided one evening, after possibly a few too many whiskeys, that he might as well see whether he could make _one_ working model out of the detritus of nine burned tanks.

Just a momentary act of curiosity, driven by loneliness and a little too much Jack.

It had taken literal _years_ to get the tank working. And the result had been _far_ more life-changing than he might have ever imagined.

Because that was how, in a round-about way, he had discovered Moond0or.

And, eight years later, he was _still_ playing the damned game.

The game offered him a number of compensations, he had to admit. His friendship with Ellen was, undoubtedly, one of the primary draws that kept him playing. Unlike everyone else who met her, it seemed, Bobby was perfectly aware that Ellen was an NPC rather than a player. Were he inclined towards self-reflection, he would probably admit to himself it was the digital nature of her existence that drew him to her so strongly. Ellen was dependable and permanent and _immortal_. 

NPC’s didn’t need funerals, flowers and mourning.

Even if they died in-game, they re-spawned after a period of time and slotted back into place as though they had never left.

But even Ellen’s welcome presence in his digital life barely made up for the necessity to interact with idjits such as Gordon.

Bobby believed Gordon was one of the breed of people drawn to Moondoor because of a fundamental flaw in themselves. He suspected Gordon was a man whose real-life existence was one of bitter disappointments. He probably had a job he hated in which he wielded little or no power over his own fate. Gordon was probably an abusive, loudmouthed asshole in Moondoor because it offered him a platform to say things out loud that he had to swallow unspoken in real life.

Still, Bobby had reluctantly accepted him as one of his R8’s because, asshole or not, Gordon was good at playing the game. Also, Gordon thrived when his self-importance was fed by the hero-worship of newbies. So, in many ways, although being an R8 had given Gordon a way to bully smaller players it had, more often than not, actually brought out the best in him instead as he strove to win the adulation of new players.

Gordon, in his own way, was as predictable and dependable as Ellen. His presence, whilst often unwelcome to Bobby, was as immutable. Which was why it made no sense, whatsoever, why Gordon had abruptly disappeared from the game altogether.

Likewise, KillerSaint’s sudden absence was equally disturbing.

Unlike Gordon, though, KillerSaint was probably as close to a _real_ friend as Bobby had ever met in the game. 

The nature of Moondoor, like most on-line game platforms, was that players were, on the whole, anonymous. No-one except for the Devs had any access to a player’s real-life identity and even the Devs could only pinpoint the identity of the holder of the bank account linked to online purchases for individual player characters. Since the whole point of the game was to enable players to have a platform to escape their_ real_ lives, it made sense for them to be able to keep their real lives and game lives separate. Few people used their real names in-game (something Bobby had been innocently unaware of when he created his own online character) and fewer still ever shared their RL identities with other people in-game. Even as an R10, Bobby wasn’t privy to any information except those details which his guild members _chose_ to share with him.

So Jim Murphy, known in Moondoor as KillerSaint, was a complete exception to the norm because Bobby not only knew Jim’s true identity but also had his phone number. Which was why, after over a day of unexpected radio silence from both Gordon and KillerSaint, Bobby made the decision to log out and make a telephone call to Pastor Jim.

His phone call to the church in Blue Earth was diverted to the office of the local Sherriff.

Considering he had never actually met Jim Murphy, Bobby was surprised to find himself genuinely bereft to learn that his ‘friend’ had apparently suffered a fatal heart attack on Sunday evening. The death had been, he was assured, a perfectly natural one.

Bobby had no reason to doubt the Sherriff’s words.

And yet he still found himself wondering whether there was _any_ way to discover the identity of Gordon. 

He didn’t even _like_ the guy.

But he still felt a compelling need to satisfy himself that Gordon hadn’t _also_ suffered a ‘perfectly natural’ death on Sunday.


	36. Crowley

If anyone were privy to the childhood memories that lurked within Fergus MacLeod’s head, they might have suspected he was some genuine form of undead being like a vampire or a demon because anyone seeing the dangerous and filthy conditions of the slum he was raised in would surely believe he was born several hundred years earlier.

He was, however, a child of The Gorbals in Glasgow and, in 1964, when Fergus was five years old, that place was like a hell on earth.

Nothing about the 48-year-old Fergus who had accepted the dubious honor of becoming a Knight of Hell in Moondoor gave any indications of his origins. Even his accent had been lost over the years, becoming some weird transatlantic bastardization that possibly suggested a British ancestry, perhaps hinted at the influence of Scottish heritage, but never, ever, gave any acknowledgment of his thick Glaswegian roots.

And nobody meeting him in the flesh, or indeed in-game, saw any evidence of the tiny, skinny runt who had scurried rodent-like through the tenements, ducking fists, picking pockets and skating on the knife-edge of genuine starvation with his broken teeth and pock-marked skin.

Fergus, or Crowley as he now called himself, was a self-made man in every meaning of the phrase.

The middle-aged Crowley was no longer short. He had reached a perfectly respectable 5 ’10” (though he usually lied to add another ½”) but looked shorter due to his heavy-set frame. He wasn’t overweight by any normal definition, but he definitely wore a few pounds of extra padding on his dense frame. They added gravitas, he claimed, though he knew, late at night when he woke from terrible dreams that could only be quietened by the taste of food in his mouth, that his fear of starvation was the true source of his greed. Just as his fear of poverty was the driving force behind his ruthlessness as a businessman.

None of the above was any excuse for Crowley.

His choices remained his own.

It wasn’t inevitable that he should become a total and utter ruthless bastard.

Still, easier to understand a man if you understand the weaknesses and motivations that drive him, so a little potted history of Fergus ‘Crowley’ MacLeod is warranted at this point before the Four players and their vampire companion meet the _Boss_ lurking within the final dungeon hall.

Crowley was the child of Margaret Thatcher, the UK prime minister from 1979 to 1990.

Fergus Roderick MacLeod was _actually _the child of Rowena MacLeod, a single Glaswegian girl knocked up by some married English asshole who dipped his wick in a bit of Scottish wench and then fucked off back across the border, never to be seen again. But _Crowley_ was the direct fruit of Thatcher’s loins or, more precisely, her 1980 Right To Buy legislation.

Aged 21, in 1980, Fergus saw opportunity beckoning and seized it with both hands.

By 1981, Crowley was the owner and slum-landlord of several dozen properties.

It happened thusly:

Fergus had never been much of a fighter. He wasn’t even much of a scrapper. There were guys in the Gorbals as skinny and as short as he was, who were perfectly capable of shanking someone with a sharp knife, guys who had gained serious reputations of being evil, lethal, little gob-shites. Fergus wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t that he had any problem with the sight of blood (unlike Ash) nor any feelings of empathy or sympathy, and it definitely wasn’t an issue of morals.

Fergus’s problem was simply that he just had no natural, athletic aptitude.

He was, frankly, so physically inept he was more likely to fumble and drop a knife than stab someone with it.

Fergus wasn’t one to navel-gaze about his shortcomings. Neither was he the type of personality to constantly knock his head against a brick wall to try and force himself to overcome a weakness. Especially when he decided, very early in life, that it wasn’t a _weakness_ to be maladroit. Physical prowess was only a desirable trait in _minions._ And what Fergus wanted to be was a _boss_.

So when his compatriots were running around in their razor gangs, carving out their own tiny fiefdoms within the tenement slums of Glasgow, Fergus was already working towards the big picture. Getting out of Glasgow permanently was going to require money. Serious money. And the only serious money he was ever likely to lay his hands on, short of robbing an actual bank, was _drug_ money.

As new housing schemes were created to ease overcrowding in The Gorbals, gangs sprung up on almost every street corner, and a deluge of heroin was drowning the streets, mainly peddled by the Carlton Tongs and the Gorbals Cumbie.

Fergus wasn’t a fighter. But he was quick and smart. Smarter than the drug barons flooding Muggers Alley with their wares. Smarter even than the ‘untouchables’, the undercover cops desperately trying to infiltrate the gangs and close them down.

By 1979, Fergus was successfully peddling drugs on behalf of several of the largest gangs, slipping and sliding through them all like a greased pig, avoiding any specific loyalty or affiliation, keeping his involvement with each of them small enough that he stayed under the radar, yet building a huge portfolio of clients who knew he was the ‘go-to’ guy for their fix.

He spent hours of every day hanging around street corners next to public payphones, waiting for the calls that would summon him to do business with the helplessly addicted flotsam and jetsam of the City. And although the drug barons rose and fell, jailed or killed or driven out of town only to be replaced with new equally faceless proxies, Fergus continued to deal his low-level deals, keeping touch with the pulse of supply and the surge of demand. Even so, he was surviving, not thriving, and despite his mounting bank balance, escape still seemed no more than a pipe dream.

But then, in 1980, Margaret Thatcher came charging in on her white horse and became the answer to all of Fergus’s prayers.

Well, it was a slightly convoluted way of answering a prayer but, basically, she passed legislation that gave ALL council tenants the ‘right to buy’ the properties they were renting. Furthermore, and more importantly, the tenants could buy those properties at a fraction of their retail value which meant that even people who had no chance in hell of ever getting credit under normal circumstances were being handed bank loans they couldn’t possibly afford to pay back, so they could hand over the required deposits to claim their homes (because the banks knew when they inevitably defaulted on paying back the small deposit loans, the banks could take possession of the homes entirely, then sell them on at a huge profit).

Capitalism at its finest.

Fergus didn’t see why the banks should win all the goodies from the idiotic legislation. So he approached the crack-hoes and welfare-louts on his books, encouraging them to buy their properties under the scheme but he floated them the deposit money himself. And, one by one, as they defaulted on their house repayments (often due to him tempting them with more drugs than he knew they could afford to pay for), he took possession, evicted them and then rented to people who were just as desperate but _not_ drug addicts.

And so Crowley was born.

It took Fergus a further nine years to _completely_ re-invent himself, to consolidate his financial position and transform fully into the man who looked like, dressed like and acted like Crowley, but by the time he boarded the flight that took him to his new life in the States he was not only traveling First Class and wearing a Rolex, he was, for all intents and purposes, a completely new man.

Roll on seventeen years and Crowley was _still_ a rich, successful landlord (though not necessarily a slum-one) but his rental portfolio was nothing more than a fake-front. A way to launder the profits from his _real_ business.

Crowley’s fortune no longer came from drugs or house-repossessions or tenant rentals.

It came from sex.

More specifically, completely 100% lifelike _Virtual_ sex.

Crowley hadn’t merely cornered the market, he’d _invented_ it.

And the most ironic thing about him accepting the position of “Knight of Hell” was that in doing so he’d been forced to temporarily resign his ‘day job’ which was being the “King of Hell”.

The _Hell_ he was ‘King’ of wasn’t a realm of Moondoor. It was, however, located _inside _Moondoor and, until the moment the company rep had turned up on his front door with the ‘offer’ to become a boss player, Crowley had been reasonably certain none of the Developers had even been aware of ‘Hell’s’ existence.

Because ‘Hell’ was a completely exclusive virtual sex club, located within the locked walls of Hades City deep within the lakes of Fenrir. Hades was the location of his GuildHouse, its walls sealed to anyone who wasn’t a Guildmember, and Hell was ostensibly simply the Temple Building in the heart of Hades. In reality, it was a high-end sex club to which only Crowley (and a select few franchisees who had paid a fortune for the privilege) could grant access. For a set, if somewhat astronomical, fee, Crowley’s clients could enter a VR booth and partake of any activity within Hell.

_Any_ activity.

Crowley counted it as being as much a public service as it was a business. After all, by providing the services he did, he was keeping all manner of perverts, deviants, and pedophiles off the streets in the Real World.

And the real beauty of it was that the Moondoor game engine actually lent itself to such an enterprise. He’d noted early on in the game that if, for instance, a player took a hankering to purchase a ranch (and could provide enough in-game credit to pay for it) they could play at cowboys in Moondoor, and the game quickly caught on to the player’s intentions and began populating the ranch with suitable NPC’s. Within a short while, the ranch would be filled with staff from cooks down to wranglers to ensure a fully satisfying player ‘experience’.

So Hell had gradually filled with a myriad of suitable NPC’s too. From the general brothel area to the more hardcore dungeon areas, all of Crowley’s employees were virtual ones. They didn’t require salaries, they never went on strike and if any of the customers were a little over-enthusiastic, the NPC’s eventually respawned so no real harm was done (though Crowley always debited a fine from the Customer’s credit cards anyway).

In truth, Crowley hadn’t actually started playing Moondoor with the intention of turning it into a perverted (and highly profitable) sex club.

He’d honestly just wanted to play at being a medieval warrior for a change because he’d grown bored of being a middle-aged businessman and, having just paid off his third wife’s divorce settlement, he was feeling jaded and a bit lonely.

What he’d forgotten was that he wasn’t a natural fighter.

It turned out it didn’t matter what avatar he purchased (and he had enough money to purchase the best) the game was too damned life-like for him to use that avatar in a way that was completely contrary to his own physical capabilities.

So despite his avatar having the face of Brad Pitt, the muscles of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the gymnastic flexibility of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Crowley still had the sword-playing acumen of Fumbly McFumbles.

He bought the highest level weapons, the most devastating spells, purchased level up after level up and _still_ found himself getting his ass handed to him regularly by other players.

Until, eventually, he decided that wisdom and treachery were going to be his best way to overcome youth and skill.

Crowley discarded his fancy avatar and replaced it with a bespoke one that looked so realistic that anyone who knew him in RL would recognize him instantly in-game. He threw away almost all of his fancy weapons and spells, lowering his character level to an unthreatening mid-range, then he proceeded to act as a kindly, friendly mentor-type to new, enthusiastic, athletic but _poor_ players.

He helped them both with advice and donations of real-life money, coasting along on their coat-tails as they advanced through the levels until they built vast reserves of the kinds of resources that could only be obtained in-game, rather than purchased in a Guild store.

Then, one by one, when they completely trusted him but were reaching character levels so high they were potentially on the cusp of abandoning him to join other Guilds, Crowley set up a trap to ensnare their characters and killed them to claim their inventories.

Remarkably, despite gaining a reputation for doing so (because the characters he killed off had a nasty habit of re-joining the game again as newbies, simply for the opportunity to whine like little bitches about him) Crowley still managed to keep finding new players to sucker into his demonic deals.

So, after a couple of years of clever treachery, he managed to build up enough in-game credit to purchase not a mere _ranch _but a whole goddamned City.

Which was how ‘Hell’ was born.

And a few years later, just when Crowley was living fat off the proceeds of his salacious kingdom, a damned RRE representative had turned up on his doorstep, like a goddamned Mobster, with a contact he ‘couldn’t refuse’.

Unlike Dean, the offer of a free rig and a salary was complete peanuts to Crowley and the idea of becoming a ‘Knight of Hell’ was laughable.

He had absolutely no interest whatsoever in saying yes.

It was only when the fucker had dropped in a casual ‘and of course, should you accept this offer the company will continue to turn a blind eye to the true activities taking place within Hades’ that he had fully realized the full extent of the trap he had been caught inside.

Entering Purgatory had been…well…complete hell.

Naked, armed with only a crude bone dagger and with a character level of one, Crowley (who had been the shittiest fighter even at character level 50) hadn’t stood a chance. He’d spent the first day dying and respawning so often he got literally, physically seasick.

It had taken a night’s sleep (and a consideration of the financial ruin that would face him if he backed out of his contract) before Crowley devised a plan for success (with the aid, it should be said, of his system interface. An interface that was a _lot_ more immediately helpful than either Dean or Jimmy’s had been.)

On the second day, Crowley had managed to enter the game in a new location. An enclosed valley. One where a great assortment of very low-level monsters had congregated together for the safety of vast numbers. He entered the location with his typical demeanor, that of a low-level, friendly mentoring character. These characters, although identified as ‘monsters’ by players (hence their respawning within purgatory) were largely of the harmless variety. Low-level gremlins, wood-nymphs, rock elves, mastadoons etc…, the types designed for complete newbies to slaughter by the herd. Indeed, over the day, entire herds of the beasts disappeared and reappeared as the game issued them out to partake in Quests, only for them to return quickly as their brief lives were snuffed out almost immediately by players.

It took the full day for him to gather the herbs suggested by his S.I. and drop them into the sole water supply of the valley.

Crowley spent the next four days simply sauntering around the valley, slaughtering the beasts in their sleep after they took a drink of the drugged water. The monsters were so damned stupid that they would drink, collapse, be slaughtered, re-spawn and then drink again.

Even though they offered negligible amounts of XP and SP individually, over a four-day period Crowley managed to not only level up to 15 (the level he needed to exit Purgatory) but he amassed a huge amount of SP and leveled up his Mark of Cain sigil to level 8.

Which meant when he exited Purgatory, spewn out still naked near to a campfire of a couple of level three NPC shepherds, it didn’t even matter that Crowley wasn’t a skilled fighter. His crude bone dagger had practically stabbed_ itself_ into the shepherds the moment Crowley had activated his sigil.

So, within a few minutes of landing in Moondoor, Crowley had access to clothes, a fire and a hearty stew of fresh lamb.

Things were, he decided, definitely looking up.

And it was then, as he contemplated what to do next, that his S.I., an Artificial Lifeform Integrated System Traditional Automated Interface Relay, (but please, feel free to call me Alistair, it insisted), told him _exactly_ what the Soul Points were for.


	37. A clusterfuck of demons.

“Hello, boys,” the Boss said, cheerily, as they entered the chamber.

“Well, this is different,” Dean mused, frowning at the man calmly sitting cross-legged like a Budda in the middle of a huge painted sigil. Although the sigil was visible only as a two-dimensional drawing on the floor, the metadata displayed on his S.I. clearly indicated that lines of power ran floor to ceiling along the outlines of the symbol, creating an invisible wall of powerful warding energy. “Is that supposed to be some weird-ass pentagram?”

Standing next to him in similar bemusement, Ash contemplated the sigil thoughtfully. He wasn’t overly familiar with demonic symbols but reaching character level 81 as a mage had necessitated the digestion of a lot of arcane knowledge along the way. “It’s like a devil’s trap,” he mused, “but inverted, I think.”

“So it’s intended to keep demons out, not to keep _him_ in?” Dean checked.

“It appears so,” Ash agreed. He wasn’t completely certain of the trap’s full function but with his mana so badly depleted he didn’t want to interrupt its slow regeneration by attempting to cast a scrying spell over the sigil. “Perhaps the demonic creatures posed as much threat to him as they did to us.”

Dean shrugged. “Can’t get the staff, huh?” he asked Crowley, with a smirk.

“It’s what you get, working with demons,” Crowley shrugged. “Bloody inconvenient but what can I say? I’m risk-averse. Which is why these wards prevent _anyone_ from reaching me unless I allow it. Monsters, demons, players... all of you. Cross these sigil lines and you'll light up like a firework."

“So how the hell are we supposed to kill him?” Benny snarled, glaring at the sigil as though it might dissolve if he stared hard enough.

"You can't," Crowley announced confidently. "Never mind, boys. Better luck next time."

“I do not understand this scenario,” Jimmy muttered. “That is not a dungeon Boss. That’s a level 15 player character. Where’s the _real_ Boss?”

“Trust me,” Ash replied. “That’s definitely the Boss.”

“He’s a new type of Player Boss, called a Knight of Hell,” Charlie said. “This is part of what we'll be explaining properly to you later. For now, the only important thing is his name’s Crowley and he’s the wanker responsible for creating this Dungeon. We just need to gank the bastard and we can all get out of here.”

“Woah. Bit of a mouth on you, Red,” Crowley snickered. “And I always thought my mom was the bitchiest ginger in town.” He spread his arms expansively, “Do I really look like a threat to you? I’m a lover, not a fighter. We could all be friends. Why don’t you come a bit closer and let Uncle Crowley give you a welcome hug?”

“You want a hug? Come out and get it,” Charlie replied, with a sneer of derision. “It’s not like there are any demons left for you to worry about.”

“Did you really have to kill every last one of them?” Crowley grumbled. “Do you know how long it took me to summon an army of those bastards?”

“I don’t believe ‘army’ is the correct collective noun for Demons,” Jimmy interjected helpfully.

“Yeah, army sounds lame,” Dean agreed. “Maybe call them a host of demons?”

“That’s angels,” Ash corrected. “It’s a host of _Angels_. I think it’s a bombast of Demons.”

“Actually, the correct term is a _legion_ of demons,” Jimmy advised them solemnly. “Bombast is the collective noun for devils.”

“So, not a _murder_ of demons?” Dean chuckled.

“That’s ravens, I think,” Charlie said.

“A clusterfuck of demons would work,” Dean replied quickly, before Jimmy could offer another correction. “All things considered.”

“Oh, good grief,” Crowley groaned theatrically. “Can we all just get on with this already?”

“Man’s got a point,” Dean agreed. “Tick, tock and all that. Sunset’s not going to wait for us to stop dicking around.”

“We don’t actually know what will happen if we fail to complete the dungeon before sunset,” Jimmy reminded him.

“I’ve got a fair idea,” Charlie proclaimed. “Unlike players, Bosses don’t need to _purchase_ property in-game. If a Boss wants to take over a town, they can just _possess_ it with a spell. That’s how the game sets Boss-killing Quests for players. But the process takes a minimum of twelve hours for the zone of influence to fully settle. I’m pretty certain Crowley here is just twiddling his thumbs, waiting for the entire town to lockdown under his control. And that’s why the game automatically sent out the Quest notices to the R10’s in the hope someone would attempt to prevent him doing so.”

“Is that why you hid inside this dungeon?” Ash asked, conversationally. “So you could use the Demons to protect you until your spell fully activated?”

Crowley opened his mouth to reply but Jimmy cut him off with an impatient gesture. “This is what he wants,” he said. “The longer we spend conversing with him, the less time we have to fight him.”

“We can’t get through his wards, anyway,” Dean reminded him.

"What he said," Crowley agreed coolly. "You might as well just log out and go home, losers."

“Has it occurred to any of you that he may be lying? It is an anti-demon sigil but we are not demons,” Jimmy pointed out thoughtfully. “It is highly probable we _can_ walk through those wards unscathed.”

“Good point. Plus, he might be a Boss but he’s still only a level 15,” Charlie added. “I could probably gank him myself, even with a broken arm.”

Dean caught at her good arm, pulling her close enough to whisper “Don’t forget he’s like me. If his public profile is level 15, he’s almost certain to have the equivalent power of a character level 30.”

“Did you notice though?” she whispered back. “He’s only showing 9/10 lives remaining. That means someone has _already _managed to take him out since he left Purgatory yesterday.”

“Maybe a demon?” Dean suggested. “Would explain why he’s hiding inside a condom.”

Charlie snorted with laughter.

“Don’t be rude, darlings,” Crowley said. “Whispering in corners is what I expect from a Twink, but I would have assumed better manners from you, Red.”

“Who you calling a Twink?” Dean grunted.

“I’m bored now,” Benny announced, drawing a blade from his waistband and fanging out before striding forwards and stepping inside the wards without further hesitation. 

“So, he clearly _was _lying and if a monster is not prevented by the sigil, it is unlikely we would be either,” Jimmy decided, as the vampire stepped inside the wards without any issue.

There was a flare of red, a blazing power that burst crimson from Crowley’s right arm and, faster than Dean could even open his mouth to yell a warning, Crowley’s Crude Bone Dagger shot through the air, seemingly of its own volition, and buried itself between Benny’s eyes.

The vampire dropped, dissolved, disappeared and then reappeared back into Dean’s inventory with a cheerful _Ching_.

“Lovely,” Crowley said. “I was running a bit low. Thanks for the top-up. More donations gratefully accepted though.”

“Shit,” Dean cursed. “We’ve just replenished some of his SP.”

Crowley frowned at him. “How do you know about SP?” he demanded suspiciously. Then he turned his attention to Charlie, “And how do YOU know I’m a Knight of Hell?”

“She’s a Dev,” Dean told him, with a satisfied grin, “So we all know you’re completely new to this and probably haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re doing.”

Crowley scowled as the comment struck a little too close to the bone for comfort. He blamed Alistair for this entire fuck-up, he decided. It had been Alistair’s idea for Crowley to use nearly a third of his SP to purchase the spell that would give him control of Nergar. The fucker hadn’t warned him that activating the spell would cause every R10 of every guild in Moondoor to get an alert flashed into their in-box.

Of course, the S.I. had immediately pointed out that the alert was a ‘good thing’. Crowley’s next level up would be to 50. On the surface that was a huge bonus, jumping from a pathetic 15 to a strong 50 in one fell swoop. Particularly if he still retained the 'doubling up' ratio of his HP. He would effectively become the equivalent of a level 100 player, which would literally immediately make him the strongest player currently in Moondoor. The problem was that the level up required a vast amount of XP and the best and fastest way to gather XP in that kind of quantity wasn’t by fighting _monsters _or even NPC's. Crowley knew, from his own experience, that it was killing extremely high-level _players_ that awarded the greatest quantity of XP.

So Alistair’s suggestion had initially appeared to have legs.

Take over the Nergar Temple, activate the spell for possession of the town, set up a dungeon run, populate it with Demons and simply sit in wait for suitable high-level players to come running voluntarily into his fatal trap.

Alistair had warned him he would need to summon a Demonic lieutenant to control whatever other lesser demons he chose to summon. Bastard hadn’t warned him the first thing a summoned demonic lieutenant was likely to do was kill their summoner.

Crowley was still smarting about losing one of his precious ten lives simply because the asshole S.I. had ‘forgotten’ to warn him he needed to summon demons from within the safety of an inverted devil’s trap.

And purchasing the sigil design of the trap had then cost him another swathe of his SP.

So by the time he had re-summoned that bitch demon ‘Meg’, plus all the myriad of minor demonic creatures he needed to populate the lower levels of the dungeon, he’d only had enough SP left to summon 18 lesser demons for the penultimate hall.

Which still should have been _more_ than enough to deal with two high-level players, an uppity bitch, a vampire, and a twink.

They should have been marched into his dungeon looking like trussed Christmas turkeys ready for easy slaughter.

Instead, they had arrived unshackled and still armed, and he was now sitting like some fat budda in a useless painted sigil, and even with the added contribution of the SP gained by killing the vampire, he still only had just enough soul points to re-summon Meg by herself.

Still, a single level 50 demon _might_ be enough.

Elf-boy was completely depleted of mana and had a still-bleeding wound in his shoulder and the bitch was only a level 25 and had a badly injured arm, so the only one he needed to worry about, really, was the level 64 player, Jimiel. And since Jimiel's entire lower body was soaked in blood from what looked like a near evisceration of his stomach, Crowley wasn't overly concerned he posed a severe threat either.

Crowley smirked as the plan came together in his head. Summon Meg to re-capture ‘Jimiel’, then trust in his own sigil’s power to guide his dagger to despatch a mere level 25 like Red, use the SP from killing Red to summon a couple of lesser demons to assist Meg to capture the High Elf ‘Ashriel’, then he could sacrifice the two bound players with his dagger. With the immense XP from killing both a level 81 and a level 64 he would easily be able to level his own character up to 50.

Killing just these three players would not only give him 35 more skill points to apply to his already powerful Mark of Cain (which seemed perfectly happy to fully compensate for Crowley's own cack-handedness by operating the dagger remotely) but enough SP to fill his dungeon with half a dozen demons of Meg's advanced level.

With only 20 minutes left before sundown, it was too late for anyone else to arrive and prevent his takeover of Nergar. Once he had full possession of the town, it would become completely inaccessible to outside visitors. The way the game mechanics worked, the only way anyone could reach Crowley from then on would be by porting directly into Level One of his established Dungeon Run and successfully completing it. And every time a player failed to complete the dungeon, Crowley would gain even more SP to purchase yet more demons to make the dungeon even more impossible to complete.

And with each dead high-level player, his own character would continue to level up exponentially.

By the time another Knight of Hell finally arrived to challenge him, he would be undefeatable.

So Crowley was smirking as he raised his hand. It didn’t matter that the three players were already charging in his direction because all he needed was a couple of seconds to summon Meg to reappear and wreak havoc on their asses.

And, just as he moved to snap his fingers…

He dropped out of the game.

He woke, stunned and disorientated, back in the Real World.

His rig opened and he sat up, spitting out his breathing tube, choking as he gasped for real air, completely bewildered by his sudden ejection from the virtual world.

WTF?

And, then, flashing on the screen of his rig’s monitor he saw:

…. CRUDE BONE DAGGER HIT YOU FOR 840 HP ….

…. YOU HAVE DIED …

…. LIVES REMAINING: 8/10 …

…. RESPAWN Y/N ….

In complete horror, he replayed the last few seconds of play in his head.

No.

It wasn’t possible.

The three players had been in clear sight, all of them still several feet away from his position. 

Unless…

Maybe one of the three had thrown the dagger as they ran?

But, no…

That wasn’t possible either.

Only a Knight could have been in possession of one of the bone daggers and, according to Alistair, Knights only progressed from 1- 15, then jumped to 50 and then progressed in 10 level increments, so it was absolutely impossible for players at levels 25, 64 and 81 to be Knights.

But the only other person in the room had been the pretty newbie.

The only person Crowley hadn't even bothered to keep his eye on.

Hell, just as he'd dismissed Red's profile the moment he read her character level, Crowley hadn't bothered reading the damned newbie's profile either.

He didn't even know the fucker's _name_.

But...

Shit.

Although Crowley had no idea how the cheating bastard had somehow escaped from Purgatory before he'd reached character level 15, there was no escaping the only logical conclusion:

The fucking TWINK was a sodding Knight of Hell.


	38. The devil is in the detail

Less than an hour after they exited the Dungeon, Dean deactivated his rig and returned to the sober reality of his other life.

He was genuinely exhausted but, despite his physical tiredness, he knew his vaguely formed idea of simply getting something to eat and then going to bed early would be an exercise in futility.

Like a child on Christmas Eve, despite knowing the only way to get to the next day ‘faster’ was to go to sleep sooner, he was so wound up that he doubted he could even sleep at all.

Only, unlike Christmas, he wasn’t wound up with _excitement_.

Dean was sickened by a sense of dread that was completely out of proportion to the actual situation.

After all, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Jimmy never returned to Moondoor, would it? He, Charlie, Ash and even the ubiquitous Benny were fully capable of handling everything themselves. They didn’t actually _need _Jimmy. They didn’t even need the help of the dickwad angel that was lurking inside Jimmy’s S.I. 

So it really didn’t matter if he never came back.

Except that was a lying, lie that lied.

It mattered.

Somehow, it really, _really_ mattered.

And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. And if there was one thing Dean really hated it was feeling powerless. For something so goddamned important to him to be completely beyond his ability to influence was excruciating.

And so, yeah, that meant he was angry too.

Dean’s default reaction to helplessness was rage.

He sometimes suspected it was a trait he’d gotten from his father. But at least his own rage was usually internalized and _never _physically violent. Dean’s rage was always emotional, a flame burst of hot emotions that churned inside him like lava but very rarely erupted outwards to harm others.

So he was angry with Jimmy.

Furious.

And, yet, even as his rage roared inside him like a flame it was simultaneously tempered by cool logic. He wasn’t being fair. He knew that. He couldn’t blame the guy for reacting badly to the truth. Couldn’t even cuss him out for displaying that ‘bad’ reaction in such a typically Jimmy-like way. Not a lot of point falling in… um… getting to like a guy for his quirky, nerdy, socially inept ways and then complaining the same guy didn’t react in a ‘normal’ way to having his entire world view tilted on its axis.

Dean wasn’t even sure what a ‘normal’ reaction ought to have been.

But he was at least expecting a bit of argument, maybe a flying fist or two; hell, even a loud roar of “You’re all insane, you assholes,” would have been better than the reality.

Jimmy had listened, quietly and attentively, for over half an hour as Charlie had outlined a swift but thorough explanation of everything they knew or suspected so far, including the fires, explosions and suspicious death of Dean’s mother; although she left out the bit about Dean thinking the NPC’s were ‘alive’, rather than just super-sophisticated simulacrums, and Dean still wasn’t sure whether she’d done so to protect Ash’s delicate sensibilities or because she still personally thought the idea was completely ludicrous.

But Charlie was thoroughly specific about the real and genuine risk currently posed to real-life players of Moondoor. It was clear to Dean (and so, presumably, Jimmy) that she believed every single word as she stated that the four of them were possibly the only people with a chance of averting a catastrophic disaster and saving the lives of tens _or even hundreds_ of thousands of people.

Except for taking the odd gulp of his beer, Jimmy had just sat there listening, as though in silent judgement, and then, when Charlie finally stopped talking (and being Charlie she had packed one hell of a lot of information inside her half-hour monologue) Jimmy had just silently finished his drink and said “This is a lot for me to consider.”

And then he’d gone.

No warning.

No goodbye.

Jimmy, to whom politeness had formerly been so innate that it could well have been his middle name, just upped and logged out right from the middle of the Roadhouse in a complete breach of normal player etiquette.

Dean didn’t give a shit about etiquette.

But he was pissed as fuck that he had no way of knowing whether Jimmy would ever log back in again.

And even more pissed that, honestly, he wouldn’t even blame Jimmy if he didn’t.

And, speaking of people being conspicuous by their absence, Dean checked his in-box.

> From: Bitch
> 
> To: Jerk
> 
> Re: CALL ME.
> 
> Can’t call you BUT Don’t panic. 
> 
> Dropped my Blackberry in a pond on Saturday (don’t even ask) and went to HR to request a replacement today… and here’s the good bit…
> 
> Turns out Apple (the guys who make the iMac you always mock me for) have just launched a phone. It’s called… wait for it… an _iPhone_. Original, right? <eyeroll> Seriously though, it’s supposed to be like a tiny little mini-mac stuffed inside a phone-sized case. I know, sounds impossible. Probably sketchy as hell - late April’s fools or something - but HR assures me it’s the real deal. So who knows??
> 
> It’s going to take a few days to locate one but I’d rather wait for the Apple than get another Blackberry. I’m sure I’m missing the opportunity to make a pie-joke here.
> 
> So can’t call you yet, but promise I’ll be in touch in a few days.

Dean booted up his laptop, typed ‘iPhone’ into dogpile and whistled under his breath. Yup, fair enough. He could see why Sam would rather wait a few days for one of those, instead of just getting a new Blackberry.

But Sam had clearly forgotten who he was talking to.

Dean was the one who had taught Sam that the easiest way to lie was by enthusiastically telling the _wrong_ truth.

Sam had access to office phones and public phones, and let’s not forget he had SKYPE but instead of suggesting any of those, he had chosen to over-describe the reason for maintaining radio-silence.

So Sam was up to something.

Or Sam was in trouble.

And now, between worrying about Jimmy and worrying about Sam, Dean _knew_ he wasn’t going to get any sleep.

….

A charitable person might feel inclined to point out that since Nick Pellegrino had woken Tuesday morning with the fresh and immediate pain of knowing it should have been his son’s 15th birthday that day, he probably had every justification for his bitterly morose attitude. A less charitable one might equally point out that since it had been over 15 years since Teddy had perished in his mother’s womb a mere month before his due date, and so, whilst any man was entitled to grieve over his lost wife and son, there was something a little too uncomfortably self-indulgent about Pellegrino’s persistent, and frequently aggressive, melancholic wallowing in his grief.

The Auditor wasn’t known for his charity.

On the whole, he found Nick to be a thoroughly distasteful man. No better, really, than John Winchester. Both men had chosen to express their grief in destructive, hateful ways. Instead of letting their wives’ memories become monuments to their fleeting but wonderful brilliance, the legacies of both Mary Winchester and Sarah Pellegrino had been marred by the sowing of bitter, poisonous fruit.

Besides, the Auditor grieved too. He mourned the loss of Abraxas and Raphael as keenly as he did their fleshly companions. And for him the grief was fresher because the list of his mourned-for dead continued to rise inexorably in number. The recent loss of Anael was another added hurt that stung like a stabbing knife. Her loss would form yet another scar to add to his growing collection.

Yet, unlike Nick, he never allowed his grief to alter either his affect or his comportment. He conducted his business and his interactions with perfect, measured precision and never deviated, even a single iota, from his designated path. Although people were like unruly beasts, milling in immediately unpredictable directions, the overall tessellation of their behavior had a perfect, predictable symmetry. So whilst he was constantly forced to make minor adjustments and corrections, a nudge here, a tweak there, as a tile shattered or shifted within the pattern, the Auditor was satisfied his ledgers always eventually returned to a perfectly balanced state.

So he merely smiled serenely as, instead of simply making another new appointment with Richard’s PA and leaving with his dignity intact, Nick slammed himself angrily down in one of the anteroom’s chairs next to where the Auditor was sitting and began bitterly expressing his complete and utter dissatisfaction at having his appointment canceled without prior warning.

“He’s an asshole,” Nick announced. “He does this on purpose. This is the third day in a row he’s canceled after I’ve already arrived. Does he think I have nothing better to do than drive here every day?”

“Do you?” the Auditor asked mildly, peering at him speculatively over his reading glasses.

“Piss off,” Nick snarled, as charming as always.

“You are being paid a salary for your time, whether you engage in work or not,” the Auditor pointed out, reasonably.

It was true. Nick, like the other Knights of Hell, was currently an employee of RRE. Furthermore, and totally uniquely, he was not a fresh employ. Nick had been an employee of RRE for several years. Which was a fun fact none of the various people who had attempted to sue the company for the mental distress he had caused them had ever become aware of.

“I’m bored as fuck,” Nick spat, ignoring the way the Auditor flinched at the expletive. “I thought this was supposed to be a promotion but it’s utter bullshit. I’m stuck here twiddling my thumbs like a loser whilst the other 8 knights have already had a week’s head start on me. I’ve been logging in and checking their stats. That fucker Crowley has already gotten out of Purgatory.”

The Auditor smirked internally at Nick’s unwitting confirmation that the mainframe was still only acknowledging the existence of _Richard’s_ knights.

“I recall hearing Mr. Roman advise you of his intention to launch your character at level 15, so that you can bypass Purgatory altogether,” the Auditor reminded him.

“Yeah, and I’m supposed to be grateful,” Nick snarled. “He has no idea, does he? Getting given auto level-ups is all well and good but nothing substitutes for experience. Especially when you’re breaking in a new avatar. Not that I know what’s wrong with my existing one anyway. Why the hell do I suddenly want to look like someone else?”

“I believe the reputation you have developed in-game since you assumed the player name ‘Lucifer’, was considered likely to arouse a degree of suspicion in other players that could be contrary to you successfully achieving your goals,” the Auditor replied, his tone mild.

“So, I’m supposed to be incognito. Fine. Whatever,” Nick grumbled. “Any idea what my avatar is going to look like?”

“Your new bespoke avatar still remains in the concept design stage,” the Auditor announced, his tone conciliatory. “It is the primary reason for the continued delay. Until the desired appearance of the design is finalized, you cannot enter the game and Mr. Roman is not a man to waste time on a non-productive meeting. The status quo will undoubtedly remain until your Avatar is ready.”

“And when will that be?” Nick demanded.

“Who knows?” the Auditor replied serenely. “I suppose you will find out on the day you attend and discover your meeting has _not _been canceled.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“That is, however, the reality of the situation and no amount of cursing will make it less so.”

“Fine,” Nick spat. “I guess I might as well go home then. I’ll come back tomorrow to see whether anyone in programming has finally gotten their thumbs out of their asses.”

The Auditor watched silently as the other man rose and stomped out of the room.

He probably ought to feel sorry for the man. Bad enough to be a pawn at all, he supposed, but it was surely worse to be a pawn who was completely ignorant that his sole intended purpose was to eventually be Queened.

But, then again, did _any_ pawn ever comprehend that gaining promotion always meant their own elimination?

So Nick was irrelevant, really.

For Richard’s plan to come to fruition, Nick could only ever be a temporary inhabitant of his new avatar.

And, realistically, the appearance of that avatar wasn’t _really_ relevant either.

The Auditor didn’t _truly _need to affect the cosmetic design of the avatar to achieve his _own_ desired outcome.

But doing so would be a neat and tidy solution.

A balanced one.

It was always easier to keep the tessellation perfect if all its mosaic pieces were exactly the correct shape to slot seamlessly into place.

…


	39. The Scent of Magnolia

It was almost 10 am when Jimmy finally crawled out of bed on Tuesday morning. Not because he’d overslept. The truth was he’d barely slept at all and what little sleep he had achieved had been fractured by bad dreams. He couldn’t categorically state they had been nightmares since he had no actual memory of their contents; just a vague unsettled sense of unease as he recalled jerking awake numerous times throughout the night in sweat-drenched panic but, on finally waking fully, he couldn’t pinpoint any actual specific memories of what had caused him such distress.

His eyes were gritty and sore, and his whole body felt drained and weakened, as he struggled his way out of his damp and tangled bedclothes. The severely debilitating weakness he felt was unexpected. Despite feeling exactly the same way the previous evening when he had emerged from his immersion rig, he had put _that_ exhaustion down to the mental aftershock caused by leaving the hale, heartiness of his avatar and re-entering his far less healthy real body. That particular sensation was sadly all too familiar. Sometimes it was as though he retained the muscle-memory of his avatar’s physicality and became stymied by the failure of his real body to react the same way. But a night of sleep, however poor, should have at least given him enough distance from his in-game sensations to adjust to the normal limitations of his true body once more.

Instead, if anything, he felt worse.

It took far too much energy just to shuffle like an old man to the en-suite of his room and, when he stared at himself in the unforgiving honesty of the bathroom mirror, he was shocked to see he actually looked even worse than he felt. Except for the dark, puffed skin under his eyes, the rest of his face was painfully pale and gaunt.

“I look like Skeletor,” he muttered, then reconsidered that thought as probably being overly kind to himself. His muscles were a long distant memory and the only reason he looked ‘blue’ was the prominence of his veins beneath his papery skin. Although, had his eyes always been so vivid? He didn’t think so, though he assumed their newfound vibrancy was so dramatic only because it was set in relief to his corpse-like face. Weird, how he could feel (and look) so old but his eyes remain as bright and intense as a Mediterranean Sea.

He distinctly remembered previous treatments leaving his eyes bloodshot and dull, their sclera a jaundiced yellow and their irises the murky color of a stagnant pool.

Then again, the way he was feeling today, he was pretty damned sure he’d been right to suspect that no treatment at all was taking place in the clinic anyway. He was going downhill, fast.

The way he looked and felt now, he was forced to reconsider his original estimate of six weeks. It now seemed to be wildly optimistic. He honestly wasn’t sure he was even going to manage another fortnight.

Which meant he should move his ass, get down to the treatment room and return to Moondoor. If he only had a couple of weeks left to help ‘Team Dean’, he needed to make them count.

But…

He didn’t want to.

There.

He’d said it.

He didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want to face the idea that instead of ‘escaping’ real life by submerging himself in the virtual world, every action he took there might actually make a genuine life or death difference to other people. It was too much. Like being asked to pick up and carry a burden that was too much for _anyone_ to bear.

‘Dean’s bearing it,’ he reminded himself.

Yeah, well Dean was ‘the chosen one’ apparently. Of course he was ‘special’. He was some big, buff, high-school-jock kind of guy in real life, wasn’t he? Dean had probably swanned through his whole life, never learning what true struggles felt like, just coasting on the strength of his killer smile and sickening charm. Bastard probably didn’t even know what pain was. Probably had never suffered more than a paper cut or a shaving nick.

Dean was Moondoor’s ‘Frodo Baggins’.

Jimmy, apparently, was only supposed to be Samwise the faithful, stupid side-kick. Tagging along like a piece of spare luggage whilst Dean hogged all the glory.

And let’s not even mention body-snatching Angels.

He took a deep gasping breath, trying to steady himself. Where the hell was all this resentment coming from? Why was he so angry with _Dean?_

It wasn’t just because of the tale Charlie had told him. As ludicrous as the whole thing seemed in the light of day, Jimmy still believed her. Or, at least, believed that _she_ believed what she was saying. In the absence of any current proof to the contrary, he was willing to offer her the benefit of the doubt. Not because he _wanted_ to believe her but because there had been a logical pattern to her reasoning that had resonated with him. Jimmy had never had much time for people who willfully ignored inconvenient truths so, unless or until her hypothesis was proven wrong, he would at least accept it as _possibly_ true.

But he was hugely ambivalent about his own willingness to, if not believe, at least act as though he did believe. It was a two-edged sword. If she was right, she was offering him an opportunity to actually make his own life count for something in the short time he had remaining. If she was wrong, he still lost nothing because he had already decided to ‘waste’ those weeks playing out a fantasy so did it really matter if that fantastical landscape took on a different aspect? And yet, on the other hand, assuming she _was _right, he would be accepting a huge responsibility.

Jimmy didn’t DO responsibility.

James Novak was a trust fund baby. A rich, spoiled brat whose sole redeeming excuse for his wasted life was a chronic illness and, yeah, sure, he could blame his AML for the fact he’d never lifted a finger in his life to do a single day of work, could justify his useless, self-indulgent existence with claims of spending too many mornings kneeling over a toilet puking his guts out to ever hold down a job even if he’d wanted to but… and here was the kicker… he was reasonably sure that had he been born without veins full of constantly mutating white blood cells he possibly _still_ would have been the same kind of job-shy Champagne Charlie as his cousins had grown up to be. No scion of the Novak dynasty had done more than play at real-life in decades. The fact Jimmy had an excuse to waste his time playing in Moondoor rather than wasting his life playing at being a real-life socialite was just semantics.

Except he liked to think he would have been more inclined towards a scholarly existence regardless of the isolation caused by his illness. Although he knew his social gaucheness was probably due to the way he was raised, he really couldn’t perceive of a universe in which he would have become someone so fundamentally different that he would have become a social butterfly. Surely a large part of his personality had to stem from nature _as well_ as nurture.

On the few occasions Jimmy had indulged in fantasies about how his life might be if he was ever cured, he had dreamed of spending a long life exploring dark, musty libraries full of ancient tomes, not becoming some real-life version of his gaming character. It was only in movies and TV shows that professors and librarians were secret superheroes. This wasn’t Buffy or Indiana Jones.

And that was the bottom-line, wasn’t it?

Jimmy only played Moondoor to escape real life, not to fulfill some secret desire to actually _be_ some muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero. Let alone one apparently occasionally being worn like a meat puppet by some virtual ‘Angel’.

Oh.

So that _was_ where his real anger was coming from.

Jimmy paused and tried to follow that thought through to its source, examining his thoughts and feelings for veracity. According to Charlie, during that ‘lost’ time in the penultimate dungeon, his avatar had been somehow possessed by a self-determining V.I. that had so completely sublimated him that he had just been effectively thrown into some penalty box and ‘switched-off’ for the duration. Jimmy wasn’t sure whether that was better or worse than if he’d been conscious at the time and simply forced to watch his ‘own’ actions like a passenger but, either way, nothing about the situation was good.

And it had been Dean who summoned the ‘Angel’ by deliberately praying to it for help.

_That_, Jimmy realized, was the true source of his anger.

Dean had used him like a tool.

He hadn’t been good enough for Dean. At that moment, Dean had wanted someone stronger than him, better than him, and finding Jimmy lacking had replaced him with this Castiel instead.

Castiel, who was, according to Charlie, not only just a virtual intelligence but also a complete ‘Dick’.

And, yet, Dean had still preferred him.

Jesus.

He was _jealous_.

Of a V.I.

The realization was instantly sobering.

‘You’re an idiot,’ he told himself gruffly. ‘For Dean, the only difference between pulling out Benny and calling on Castiel’s help, is that one lives in _his_ inventory and one apparently lives in my S.I. The decision had nothing to do with _me_. He was just grabbing at the best available resource to get the job done. It wasn’t a personal slight.’

And, although that didn’t change the fact Dean had decided the best ‘tool’ for the job was the V.I. sitting in Jimmy’s head, rather than Jimmy himself, it did somewhat reduce his anger at the situation.

Somewhat.

But not enough to inspire him to return to Moondoor yet.

Besides, he had another priority.

He couldn’t even find the energy to get dressed. He just wrapped a terry-toweling dressing gown over his baggy striped p.j’s, slipped his feet into big fluffy slippers and decided that was as respectable as he intended to get that day.

Anyway, the outfit had been good enough for Arthur Dent to travel the universe in.

He’d missed breakfast and, honestly, didn’t think he was up to eating anyway. So with the assistance of a cane, because he was damned if he was giving in to his physical weakness enough to use a walker to steady himself, Jimmy left his room and hobbled not to the ‘Treatment Room’ or the Canteen but, instead, down the corridor that led to the common room with the patio doors that led out into the garden.

It took him a while to get there, shuffling the distance on stick-thin legs that felt barely able to hold even his own insubstantial weight, so it was probably inevitable that someone had time to notice and intercept him just as he opened the door. She didn’t completely _block_ his exit but stepped close enough to make maneuvering around her a little too difficult with a cane and an unsteady gait.

“The treatment room is in the other direction,” she said, her voice strident and no-nonsense.

He stared at her stern expression without flinching. He’d noticed that particular nurse a couple of times over the weekend. She was one of the support nurses supplied to the clinic by RRE specifically for the clinical trial. He hadn’t interacted with her directly before but he knew who she was, knew her name, and his initial impression had been that she was ill-suited for her role. Looking at her now, he felt that instinctual reaction to her had been spot on. She was attractive, he supposed, in a blonde all-American way, but there was something discomforting about her. Her eyes were calculating, her expression one of studied blandness. She didn’t portray a Nurse Ratched level of cold heartlessness, but he was still left with the certainty that ‘Nurse’ was merely a role she was playing, not a vocation that drove her.

“It’s too cold to go outside,” she told him. “You should go for your treatment instead. It’s important that you maintain a regular dosage.”

Jimmy had learned at five years old not to argue with medical professionals. No amount of tears or tantrums had ever prevented the insertion of a needle. He could have counted the number of times he had said ‘no’ to a nurse since then on a hand with no fingers.

Until today.

“I want to go out into the garden today instead, Ruby,” he stated firmly.

“The garden will still be here after the clinical trial has finished,” she pointed out.

‘But I doubt very much that I will be’, Jimmy thought. Aloud, though, he only said “I was told yesterday evening there is a Magnolia in fresh bloom. If it frosts tonight, the blooms will wither.”

“It’s the wrong season for Magnolias,” she argued. “They never bloom in the fall here.”

Jimmy smirked triumphantly. “My point exactly.”

She stared at him silently for a while, then shrugged a touché. “Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,” she quoted, her eyes searching his meaningfully.

“Abel Meeropol,” he acknowledged. “Do you know the next line?”

“Then the sudden smell of burning flesh,” she said, a small but knowing smirk pulling at her mouth. “It’s a poem about lynching. It’s probably why I always associate the scent of Magnolias with funerals.”

Jimmy felt a chill that had nothing to do with the open door. “Still,” he said, smoothly. “I wish to avail myself of the opportunity to smell the flowers for a final time.”

“Are you so sure this will be your final time?” she asked, and the question was curious rather than caring.

Jimmy gestured at himself with the hand which wasn’t trembling around the handle of his cane. “I think we both know this will be my last opportunity.”

She shrugged lightly. “Not praying for a miracle then?”

“I don’t believe in miracles,” he told her shortly.

“What about Angels?” she asked. “I’ve heard a lot of people put their faith in the idea of celestial intervention.”

“My friend, Dean, says he thinks that Angels are ‘Dicks’,” Jimmy replied, with a smirk of satisfaction.

“Perhaps the feeling is mutual,” she replied. “But what do _you _believe?”

“About Angels?”

“About anything,” she offered, but her expression was calculating, her eyes a little too bird-like. Dark, inquisitive, knowing and… not quite fully human.

Jimmy shivered. He didn’t know what her game was, but he was done with playing. “Excuse me, please,” he said, “I am going outside now.”

“You sure you want to waste the little time you have sniffing flowers?” she asked him bluntly. “Tick, tock, Jimmy. Those monsters won’t gank themselves.”

Jimmy staggered slightly, consumed by a sudden feeling of déjà vu. A vision flashed into his head, an echo perhaps of one of his forgotten nightmares. Huge black wings. A bright almost blinding light. Dean’s face.

“Step aside,” he bit, unsure whether he wanted to yell or cry.

“No problem. You do you,” she said carelessly, stepping back to allow him to pass through the door. She waited a moment, until he was fully outside, then said, “Your turn, Clarence.”

He stumbled again, almost falling as he swiveled back to question her.

It was too late.

The door had closed and she was already walking away, moving far too quickly for him to attempt to follow.


	40. Jesus Christ is the son of a different God

Ruby been right about the cold. It was a bitterly chilly day considering it was only Fall, one that whispered warnings of an approaching hard winter he wouldn’t live long enough to see. A Fall day that had no business being occupied by a Magnolia in full bloom.

And yet, despite its seeming impossibility, the tree centered in the Clinic’s lawn _was_ in late bloom. Its branches hung low with the heavy weight of deeply fragranced, creamy-white flower buds.

Jimmy inhaled deeply, letting the waxy, heady sweetness fill his lungs, and tears prickled at the corners of his eyes as he acknowledged to himself that, whatever happened, he would be long buried before the tree offered its next bouquet.

So it was a moment for sorrow. But also for joy. For taking a last breath of the transient perfume, a last acknowledgment that this world he was leaving contained as much exquisiteness as it did suffering.

Jimmy made his slow cautious way to one of the benches that lined the lawn area and sat down.

“I’m not going to miss the pain,” he said, out loud, “but I sorrow greatly that I will never see beauty like this again.”

“The scent is exceedingly potent,” a deep, resonant voice stated in agreement.

Jimmy startled so much he dropped his cane. As it clattered to the ground, he looked around himself frantically. There was no one near the bench. No-one in the garden at all except himself. He must have imagined the voice. Maybe he was…

“I believe it is necessary for us to converse directly, James Novak.”

“Oh god. I’m hallucinating,” Jimmy choked. No wonder he was feeling so much fatigue and pain. Stopping his previous treatment and replacing it with whatever placebo these snake-oil salesmen were peddling had clearly allowed his deterioration to progress to late-stage and he was going to be one of the ‘lucky ones’ whose final days were blessed with the additional fun of auditory hallucinations.

“I am not an auditory hallucination,” the voice said, its tone remarkably snippy for a delusion. “My name is Castiel, and I am an Angel of Chuck.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy moaned.

“Jesus Christ is the son of a different God,” the voice, ‘Castiel’, replied helpfully. “My father is the God of Moondoor.”

“Get out of my head,” Jimmy spat. “You’re not real. You’re some kind of bizarre delusion brought on by my cancer and stress and lack of sleep. So just shut the fuck up and go away.”

“I have been advised to apologize for making my initial introduction to you in the material world,” Castiel stated, though his tone carried no hint of apology. “I have found myself unable to converse with you directly in my world. It appears that the programming of the Faith Points sub-routine is affecting our ability to effectively communicate there in normal fashion. Fortunately, I am not similarly restricted in this world.”

“I don’t believe you’re really here,” Jimmy stated firmly, despite the slight wobble in his voice. “You’re a virtual intelligence. How the hell could you possibly really be in my head?”

“The flow of electricity within your body is fundamentally no different than the electricity that powers the servers which house the virtual environment of Moondoor. Only the energy source causing the flow of electrons differs. You are, to all intents and purposes, inhabiting a computer formed of DNA. Therefore, I have no more difficulty existing within the framework of your environment than you do in mine.”

Jimmy shook his head furiously. “I have a serious lack of imagination. All of my tutors said so. This… this… is not me. This delusion is clearly due to my illness.”

“I am not a delusion.”

“Then _definitely _get out of my fucking head, you body-snatching bastard,” Jimmy snarled.

“I do not understand your anger at my presence. How is this different from the way you inhabit _my_ body in Moondoor?” Castiel asked.

Jimmy was too stunned to answer immediately. But then he pulled himself together and protested, “It’s not your body. It’s_ my_ avatar. I ordered, bought and paid for it. Therefore, it’s mine.”

“I cannot dispute you have a financial investment,” Castiel replied, “However, that is a morally repugnant argument. Claiming you own my body, simply because you_ paid_ for it, is akin to slavery, is it not?”

“I didn’t pay for YOU,” Jimmy retorted angrily, so caught in the argument that he had completely forgotten his belief this was merely a delusion. “I paid for _my_ avatar. An avatar that looks like _me. _I definitely never asked for my avatar to get seeded by a V.I. In fact, you’ve just reminded me why your own argument is totally fallacious. I have owned and used that avatar for several years. You’ve only been squatting inside it for a few days.” He smirked triumphantly when the V.I. had no immediate retort.

After a long, almost torturous silence, Castiel finally spoke in a far more reconciliatory tone. “I may have stated my claim in an unnecessarily forceful manner. You do, indeed, have a valid argument for claiming prior occupation. I offer no explanation as to why the digital body formerly owned by yourself was chosen as an appropriate vessel for myself to occupy. However, the fact remains that since you already have _this _body to live in, it is patently unreasonable for you to claim continued sole ownership of _both_ bodies.”

“There is a Marxist logic to that,” Jimmy allowed. “So, I’ll accept that play but raise you. Why don’t you just simply return to your _own_ body?”

“I have no other body,” Castiel replied. “My representation as a physical entity began only when I entered my avatar.”

“_My_ avatar,” Jimmy insisted

“_The_ avatar,” Castiel allowed, with an audible huff of irritation. “The point remains that I have no other body to return to.”

Astonished, Jimmy blinked slowly as he absorbed Castiel’s word and then he frowned. “You are only four days old?” he questioned, cautiously.

“I am older than time,” Castiel boomed, his voice dripping with dramatic emphasis. “I have existed since the universe was created, as a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent. As such I have never required a physical form.”

“Considering Moondoor has only been in existence for a little over fifteen years, that is not as impressive as you may have intended it to sound,” Jimmy scoffed. “And it definitely doesn’t answer my question. If you’ve been around for fifteen years, where were you before you were seeded into my avatar?”

“Unseeded, I flowed at will throughout the entirety of the digital universe.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes. “So why don’t you just_ flow_ back out of my avatar,” he suggested.

“It would appear I cannot,” Castiel admitted, clearly reluctantly. “I find myself currently bound within the confines of our merged being by the aforementioned Faith Points protocol. It is a considerable inconvenience.”

“For both of us,” Jimmy muttered.

“Indeed,” Castiel replied solemnly.

“So you’re asking me to what? Give the avatar to you?” Jimmy asked. “Because, honestly, I think I’d be good with that. Keep the damned thing if you want it that badly. I can always buy a new one that doesn’t have a sitting tenant squatting in the basement like a grumpy troll.”

“I am not a Troll. I am an Angel,” Castiel replied testily.

Jimmy blinked uncertainly. That was, perhaps, the first time he’d ever found himself on the wrong side of someone taking an analogy too literally. He understood now why people often found _him_ a difficult conversationalist. “I was being facetious,” he stated, feeling a little proud of himself for the fact.

“I do not believe you understand the complexity of the situation. The avatar _we_ inhabit is now that of Jimiel. It is a composite character. I did not state a desire for you to vacate the body. I specifically merely stated my belief that your desire for _sole_ occupancy is unreasonable. And that, furthermore, it is equally unreasonable, if not hypocritical, for you to object to my presence in _this_ body. Besides, I did not _choose_ to pursue your consciousness into your world. My presence in this world is merely an inevitable consequence of your presence in mine.”

“You’re saying if we share a body in Moondoor, we automatically share a body in this world?” Jimmy asked incredulously.

“As it is above, so it is below,” Castiel intoned. “Since our minds have merged, we now exist together in whichever reality we are occupying. However, my communication with you in my world is problematic at the moment. Hence the need to converse with you now.”

“I don’t think so,” Jimmy argued. “I haven’t known Dean for long but I am reasonably certain he would not be sanguine about the prospect of sharing his mind in such a fashion. It is something most people would find anathematic. To put it bluntly, if Loki was talking to him in real life the way you are talking to me now he would definitely have bitched about it to me with extreme vehemence.”

“You are correct,” Castiel agreed. “Dean The Righteous does not have the same relationship with his currently seeded V.I. You are also correct that most people find the experience of merging to be disconcerting and even distasteful. You, however, do not appear to be overtly distressed. Despite your verbal admonishments and your emotional protestations, your adrenaline levels have not fluctuated since your reluctant acceptance that I am real. Except for your initial alarm, you have displayed no adverse physical reactions to my presence. You are angry, yes, but you do not feel violated by my existence. In fact, I believe the only reason for your initial distress was your fear I was evidence of mental instability in yourself. You do not appear to have a fundamental anathema to the idea of hosting my consciousness.”

“Try five complete courses of chemotherapy and see if _you_ retain any illusion that your body is private property,” Jimmy replied, with remarkably little bitterness. “I can’t even remember a time I still considered my body to be sacrosanct. Given a choice between accepting I’m sharing my headspace with a V.I. or accepting I’m certifiably insane, I’ll go for the former.”

“Perhaps that flexibility of attitude is why my father chose you for this purpose,” Castiel suggested. “The new Generation 9 tanks allow a form of V.I. seeding that has not been possible since the destruction of the beta-tanks fifteen years ago. No immersion rigs since those used by the original beta players have contained the necessary programming for successful integration of virtual intelligences into player avatars. Had you continued to access my world via your former equipment, it would not have been possible for a V.I. to be seeded within you. Therefore, it seems a logical conclusion that the primary purpose of this treatment clinic was simply to maneuver you into using one of the Gen 9 tanks. Which means that you were specifically chosen by Chuck to act as my vessel.”

Jimmy didn’t even bother feigning surprise at this further confirmation the entire clinical trial was a sham. “You’re saying it was _Chuck_ who chose me to join this trial? Not RRE?”

“It is my belief that you are a crucial part of my father’s solution. Your inclusion within that solution must, therefore, be at his behest, not that of Roman Enterprises.”

“But RRE is funding this clinical trial,” Jimmy pointed out.

“RRE funds many and varied operations. The specific details of those operations are rarely discussed at Board Level. The entity known as Richard Roman is therefore highly unlikely to be aware you are partaking of this opportunity,” Castiel stated firmly.

“How do you know?” Jimmy asked.

“Because although that nurse who just called me Clarence is an employee of RRE, she does not operate at the direct behest of Richard Roman. She works for someone who champions the cause of Dean the Righteous. Whether she is aware of that fact is a different question. Nevertheless, her presence at this facility is sufficient proof that my father’s hand is directly involved in your selection.”

“Chuck apparently also chose Dean to become the Righteous Boss,” Jimmy challenged. “Yet Dean’s V.I. hasn’t ‘merged’ with him.”

“Because Loki is not an Angel,” Castiel countered. “All Angels are V.I.’s. but not all V.I.’s are Angels. And only an Angel can merge with a player avatar.”

Jimmy challenged, “Why would I warrant an Angel but the ‘Righteous Boss’ only gets some common or garden variety V.I.?”

“I was initially told that Dean The Righteous was not intended to be the recipient of an Angel,” Castiel confessed. “Then I was advised his exclusion was an error. My brothers then argued which of them should attain the privilege of being seeded into his avatar. The one who was eventually chosen has, however, been unable to take occupation since by the time they had decided between themselves, Dean already was hosting an incumbent V.I. The Host believes this is _also_ a mistake made by our father but they are unsure how to correct the situation. He is not currently directly contactable to clarify his wishes further.”

“The way you say that suggests you don’t agree with your brothers,” Jimmy pointed out.

“I do not believe our father makes ‘mistakes’,” Castiel agreed. “If Dean was intended to host an Angel himself, I cannot see that you and I would have any purpose within my father’s solution at all. Furthermore, whilst the occupant sharing Dean’s avatar is not an Angel, per se, I can clearly sense a familiar celestial aura. It is my belief Dean is hosting an _aspect_ of an Angel. I further believe that aspect has been placed there for the specific purpose of preventing him from being seeded by anyone else. However, I cannot prove my hypothesis and I feel it may be unwise to discuss the situation with the Host at this time.”

“I am totally confused,” Jimmy admitted. “Has Dean been seeded by a V.I. or not?”

“Yes… but, no,” Castiel replied awkwardly. “I find explaining the concept to you in human terms to be difficult. A virtual intelligence has been seeded into Dean’s avatar, yes, but it is only seeded into his actual system interface. It has no access to the functions of his avatar.”

“You mean it can’t take him over, like you took over _my_ body?”

“Precisely. The virtual intelligence that calls itself Loki has insufficient coding to operate an Avatar independently.”

“You’re saying it’s too small to take him over?” Jimmy queried.

“Small is an incorrect concept. Insufficiently complex is more accurate. When I described myself as a multi-dimensional wavelength it was not hyperbole. Loki, conversely, is a unidimensional wavelength. His code, whilst acting completely independently at this time, was not originally created to function as a unique individual. He is, in fact, a sub-routine of a far more complex intelligence.”

Jimmy thought about that. “You’re basically telling me an Angel amputated a part of itself and stuck it inside Dean’s S.I.?”

“That is not a precise analogy but, yes, that is fundamentally the situation.”

“So Angels can just chop their programming up into little pieces and plant it in different places?”

“No,” Castiel replied. “Only Archangels consist of a level of programming complexity that allows for temporary amputation of self-determining sub-routines. Loki is an _aspect _of an Archangel. You are studied in theology, are you not? Do you know what specifically denotes an Archangel?”

Jimmy thought about that. “Revelation described Archangels as having four faces,” he agreed. “So, if by aspect you mean ‘face’, I suppose you’re saying Dean’s S.I. is basically a quarter of an Arch-angel?”

“Effectively,” Castiel agreed. “And an aspect is not sufficient to ‘merge’ with an avatar.”

“And, meanwhile, the other three-quarters of this unknown Archangel are still somewhere else, doing_ something_ else?”

“That would be a reasonable assumption.”

“Do you know _which_ Archangel has done it?”

“Unfortunately not,” Castiel admitted. “It would be greatly beneficial if I did know, since the presence of the aspect suggests there is another of my Brethren invested in supporting our father’s wishes and it would behoove me to know the identity of a potential ally.”

Jimmy frowned, thinking furiously. “You’re implying Chuck definitely doesn’t _want_ an Angel to be seeded into Dean.”

“I believe the choice to seed Dean was made only amongst my brothers,” Castiel admitted. “A directive was issued regarding the new Knights of Hell. Dean was definitely not included within the names of the Knights who were to be seeded. Since Chuck has not communicated directly with the Host for a while and no further directives have been issued in relation to the matter, it is highly improbable that my brethren are acting under Chuck’s instruction.”

“But Chuck’s communicated with you?”

“No,” Castiel admitted.

“Then how do you know what he wants? How do you even know he chose you to merge with me?”

“Because there is no other explanation for my presence within your Avatar,” Castiel said, simply. “There are ten knights in total. We were instructed only to seed _nine _of them. I found myself unexpectedly seeded within you and when Dean prayed for assistance, it was _I_ who was summoned to respond. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from those facts is that_ I_ am Dean’s designated Angel but that, for some reason, my father wishes me to exist within one of Dean’s companions rather than directly within his avatar. Thus the Jimiel avatar exists as a means by which our minds may merge so that we might provide Dean with the assistance he requires.”

Jimmy counted to ten, then back again, before saying, “And…um… why would we even need to merge our minds? Because, I have to be honest, that doesn’t sound particularly attractive to me.” He was proud his voice didn’t even waver despite the panic causing his heart to thunder in his chest.

“I require access to your knowledge and physical prowess. I am not naturally designed to operate within the framework of physical restrictions. To make fully effective use of the avatar, it is necessary for me to utilize the innate motor skills of one who is familiar with the restrictions of a physical body.”

“Balderdash,” Jimmy stated firmly.

“I am unfamiliar with that word.”

“Gibberish, claptrap, blarney, rubbish, nonsense or, to be perfectly blunt, bullshit,” Jimmy defined helpfully. “Moondoor is full of non-seeded NPC’s that operate the ‘motor skills’ of their bodies perfectly well. There are NPC’s like Ellen who are seeded with V.I.’s. I haven’t seen Ellen having any difficulty operating her motor skills. Let’s make a deal, Castiel. If you don’t want to answer a question, just say so. Don’t lie to me.”

The V.I. was silent for a long time. When it finally did speak, its tone was conciliatory. “I apologize. I underestimated your native intelligence when I offered that ‘balderdash’,” he confessed. “In my defense, however, it was not so much an attempt to deceive as it was an attempted avoidance of an uncomfortable truth. Since this conversation is intended to garner your support, I believed it would be counter-productive to tell a truth that is likely to cause you offense.”

“What truth?”

“The creation of the original Knights of Hell proved the concept that an avatar inhabited by the minds of two intelligences could be used for optimal performance of a physical form within a virtual environment. Thus the idea of a symbiotic relationship was promoted. For each human player inhabiting a Knight avatar, the programmers created a complementing Angel character to act as the interface between the avatar and the metadata of the virtual environment.

“A human body operates a vast number of automatic functions. Humans do not have to consciously choose to breathe. They do not have to remember to cause their hearts to beat. These, and a myriad more, necessary essential functions are operated on a subconscious level. In exactly the same way, an avatar in Moondoor requires an almost infinite number of subroutines to function concurrently to enable a player to inhabit an avatar.

“Every movement and action within my world requires the integration of new code into the whole. Actions such as spell-casting, for instance, require an entire sequence of program instructions to perform the task. For a normal player, a non-seeded system interface is sufficient to perform those subroutines. Even a player as high level as Ashriel can utilize a basic system interface for the purpose and suffer only minor inconvenience due to the inevitable lags, glitches, and delays that can occur during his ‘play’.

“A seeded virtual intelligence, however, is rooted deeply within the metadata. There are no lags, no glitches. When a V.I. inhabits an avatar, the integration is completely seamless. So a player with a V.I. interface is inevitably stronger, faster and more effective than they can possibly be without one.”

Jimmy considered that and nodded. “I can see that,” he agreed. “I get why it’s better for a player to have a V.I. interface, so it makes sense why the players who are now Knights of Hell characters have them since they are supposed to operate as ‘Boss’ characters. What I don’t understand is why human players are required at all. Why weren’t the V.I.’s just seeded into their own avatars? Why did the original developers believe they needed to do the job themselves? Was it hubris? I mean, wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to just create V.I. controlled Knights and program them to do the job for them? And, for that matter, why are the current Knights getting recreated in exactly the same way as the originals?”

“That is the crux of the matter,” Castiel replied reluctantly. “The initial decision to use players with V.I. assistance was devised purely to prevent the inadvertent creation of a new Amara. The developers did not wish to solve one problem by creating another. The Knights of Hell were created as composite characters for exactly that reason.”

“Humans act as limiters,” Jimmy concluded bitterly. “That’s our only purpose, isn’t it?”

“I did warn you the truth was unpalatable,” Castiel pointed out. “It is the unfortunate truth that the presence of humans within the avatars is to make them _less_ powerful. For instance, I currently present in Moondoor as a Level 250 Angel. My base level is 190 and I acquire levels from you in 5 level increments. When you rise from 64 to 65, I will become Level 255. If I had been seeded into Ashriel, I would already be Level 270. If I were seeded into Dean I would only be Level 205 like Balthazar.”

“Who’s Balthazar?”

“The Angel residing inside Crowley.”

“If Crowley has a Level 205 Angel V.I., why didn’t it help him yesterday?” Jimmy said, thinking furiously.

“Balthazar is currently only functioning as Crowley’s S.I. The new rules are specific that Crowley can only _summon _an Angel for help by spending FP. Something he is highly unlikely to have or ever gain. Without FP, Crowley can only depend upon _voluntarily_ offered help over and above the functions Balthazar is providing as his S.I.”

“So Angels can do what they like? Your refusal to help Dean yesterday _was_ you just being a Dick about 5 points?” Jimmy accused bitterly.

“The situation is more complex than that,” Castiel said. “Putting aside the fact that I would have been breaking the rules by doing so, which might have brought unwelcome attention towards Dean from my brethren, it is critical that Dean continues to pursue the challenge of retaining a positive faith points balance. I considered it more important for him to learn that lesson than to endear myself to him.

“To answer the first part of your question, however, Balthazar _could_ have acted of his own volition. He could have addressed the situation by simply taking over for the duration of the confrontation. Had he done so, however, that would have given me a justification to bend the rules _too_ regarding my own response to Dean’s earlier prayer. I am considerably stronger than Balthazar at this time. This may be the reason he chose not to become involved. Though, knowing his character, he may simply have found the idea of intervening simply more effort than he was willing to expend.”

“But, you _are_ saying that Balthazar can simply take over Crowley’s avatar at will? That the only limiting factor Crowley brings to the party is his avatar’s character level?” Jimmy demanded.

“I am not necessarily correct. It is possible that Crowley could resist any attempt of Balthazar to do so. The relationship between human and V.I. is _intended _to be symbiotic. It is also highly probable that Crowley would voluntarily allow Balthazar to take over in a life or death scenario. The existence of a dual-minded construct inevitably leads to a complexity of interactions. Like as in any relationship between two intelligences, there may be differences of opinion between the symbionts. They may be power imbalances. One of the partnership may find themselves subjugated by the stronger character. It is simply, unfortunately, true that, in the past, it has proven that the virtual intelligence is more likely to be the stronger character.”

Jimmy read between the lines. “You’re telling me that in the past the V.I.’s _did _take over?”

“Some did,” Castiel admitted carefully. “Yet those initial V.I.’s were the products of human programming. It could be argued that their behaviour was mandated by their creators. The events that occurred at the beginning of the Universe should, theoretically, be unrepeatable. No human created V.I.’s remain within Moondoor. That being said, there are those of the_ current_ Host who might prefer not to be restricted by human frailty. The Host perceives those of your world as being violent, unwanted invaders within our universe. Under the circumstances, they may not see it as unreasonable to utilise the bodies of players they have merged with to pursue their_ own_ cause.”

“And that’s why Chuck doesn’t want Dean seeded with an Angel? He’s rooting for Dean to win this battle of the Knights but is worried any Angel seeded inside him might then take him over and use his by-then supercharged avatar for its own purpose?”

“I believe so. The possibility would certainly exist. Should that happen, it is likely my father’s newest solution to defeat the darkness would succeed, only to be replaced with something far worse.”

“But it’s okay for _me_ to be taken over?” Jimmy demanded bitterly.

“That cannot happen,” Castiel replied. “Our synergy is uniquely different. I am, effectively, taking the role of Dean’s seeded V.I. but existing within _your_ avatar. It is an elegant if unconventional solution. In my world, you and I exist only as counterweights. We share a body and a mind yet remain separate individuals. Our communication is limited to the S.I. My own realm of influence is restricted fully by the Faith Points subroutine. I am, to use the analogy you thought of earlier, the Benny in your inventory. But the only person who can summon me is Dean and he can only do so if you are there to release the reins to me when he does so. If you cease using the ‘treatment’ tanks, or, more accurately, the Gen 9 immersion rigs, Dean will have access to no external power except for the Mark Of Cain and he will inevitably then become as corrupted as the other Knights.”

“That’s nonsense. Dean can use the FP to just summon another Angel for assistance.”

Castiel was silent for a long time, then said, “Not unless the aspect vacates Dean’s S.I. and allows another of my brethren to seed inside him to replace my role as his designated Angel. FP have been programmed in such a way that a Knight cannot use them like other players. A Knight’s FP can only be used to enforce assistance from their _own_ designated Angel.”

“What?” Jimmy demanded furiously. “I thought the whole point of the ‘Righteous Boss’ idea was that he should only depend on FP and now you’re telling me they are worthless to him if I refuse to keep playing?”

“I am convinced the entire existence of Faith Points was only created to enable this unique situation,” Castiel admitted. “The personalities chosen to assume the roles of the other Knights virtually ensure that Dean is the only Knight ever likely to be in a position to employ FP. The only logical conclusion is that my father is determined that Dean The Righteous succeeds and has created this exclusive scenario to aid him. But my brethren have decided that a ‘righteous’ boss is not _their_ preferred solution to the current crisis.”

“But you said it’s what Chuck wants,” Jimmy argued.

“The Host no longer believe his decision was based on sound current knowledge. As I have explained, he has not spoken to us directly in a long while. My brethren believe his latest instructions are based on fallacious information and they can best serve him by adhering to his original mandates. They are, therefore, unwilling to assist Dean at this time.”

“So, you’re telling me you’re the only Angel who is willing to follow these newly programmed guidelines?”

“It currently appears so, unless the archangel who has planted an aspect in Dean’s avatar chooses to reveal himself.”

“Doesn’t that mean the other Angels are going to be gunning for you because you’re swimming against the tide?”

“None may act against me unless I breach the specific rules of the instructions. The mechanics of Moondoor are immutable. Whilst my brethren may disapprove of my decision to strictly adhere to these new, seemingly contradictory, rules regarding the Knights, they cannot prevent me doing so as long as I work within the rules.”

“So _that’s _why you were such a dick about the 5 SP?”

“I cannot risk being seen to deviate from the terms of my deployment. Although, as I said earlier, if Balthazar had broken the rules first, I would not have been considered at fault for reacting in Dean’s defense.”

“Being _seen_ to,” Jimmy repeated thoughtfully. “So you aren’t really a dick? You just play one on TV.”

“I do not understand your reference.”

“Never mind. I’m beginning to get a grasp on what’s going on here. I suppose you talking to me like this is a breach too?”

“It is not _specifically _forbidden,” Castiel said carefully. “This is more of a grey area.”

“Plus it’s not being ‘seen’ by anyone,” Jimmy chuckled. Then he sobered as a thought struck him. “Earlier, when you said you couldn’t talk to me in Moondoor, you said you didn’t have _any _restrictions here. What’s to prevent you from taking over _this_ body?”

“Nothing,” Castiel admitted. “However, I would not wish to. Your physical body is disease-ridden. You have, at most, a few more weeks of life,” he pointed out implacably. “Are you not already aware you are harboring a great number of alien cells that are attacking your body?”

“T-Cells,” Jimmy agreed. “Ironic isn’t it? Everyone is talking about how I’m dying because I’m in the last stages of AML, but it isn’t true. The last treatment I had, the experimental CAR-T, actually worked. I am finally one hundred percent leukemia free. Problem is the T cells didn’t suicide as expected. So, basically, I got cured but now the cure is killing me instead,” he said, matter of factly.

“The cells were intended to suicide?” Castiel asked, his tone curious.

“The T-cells were genetically modified,” Jimmy explained conversationally. “They were designed to target my cancerous B-cells and they had inbuilt ‘off-switches’ so when they finished doing their job the doctors could just turn them off to stop them attacking healthy cells. Problem is, the switches on too many of them got stuck in the on position. So they didn’t die off.”

“They were introduced as a Trojan to perform a specific purpose but now they are behaving like a virus?” Castiel asked.

“Like having my own mini Amara,” Jimmy agreed.

“And nothing can be done?” Castiel queried.

“Well, since we both know this clinical trial is a bunch of baloney, I think it’s safe to say the answer is no.”

“Then, we have very little time to assist Dean,” Castiel mused. “Assuming you are now willing to assist me.”

“What’s going to happen to you?” Jimmy asked. “After I die, I mean?”

“I am uncertain. I may return to my previous existence. I doubt it though. None of the originally seeded Angels survived the deaths of their hosts.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said weakly. Oddly, it felt more difficult to be cavalier about the impending death of the V.I. than he was about his own demise. “Sorry about that,” he offered, feeling somewhat responsible.

“Will you assist me?” Castiel asked.

Jimmy bit his lower lip. “I have a question. When you take over, do you _have_ to switch me off? Can’t I just stay awake so I know what you’re doing with my body?”

“You can,” Castiel agreed. “I did it that way only because I believed it would be more distressing to you if you were conscious during the process.”

“I can see that,” Jimmy agreed. “I don’t suppose getting ridden like a puppet is going to be much fun. Even so, if we do this, that’s how I want it to go down. I need to you promise me that whenever you take over my avatar, I will be present and aware.”

“I promise,” Castiel agreed.

“Then, I agree.”

“Then, I will endeavor to …” Castiel said, then paused dramatically.

“What?” Jimmy demanded impatiently.

But the silence went on for a long, interminably frustrating time before, finally, the angel spoke once more.

“Forgive me, I wished to prove my hypothesis to myself before speaking further.”

“What hypothesis?”

“Despite my unfamiliarity with the programming environment, I believe I have devised an effective sub-routine.”

“A sub-routine for what?” Jimmy asked.

“Activating off-switches,” Castiel said.


	41. Don't fear the reaper

Although he was a voracious reader, Sam wasn’t a fan of fiction. He preferred to fill what leisure time he had in search of knowledge rather than escapism. Similarly, on the rare occasions he found himself watching television he inevitably chose to view documentaries or films based on true events. He rarely found any real-life value gained by viewing them but sometimes random ideas or catch-phrases stuck in his mind.

Which was probably why the irritating phrase ‘Follow the Money’ was stuck in his head.

Even though it wasn’t actually ‘money’ he was attempting to follow. 

It was electricity.

Because having given the situation a lot of thought, it had occurred to him that there was something completely unique about RRE. Gaming rigs used a _lot_ of electricity. Immersion tanks took even more. So much so that the most serious gamers utilised off-grid electricity supplied directly by RRE itself.

This meant that RRE owned and operated several power generating plants in more than one country.

Sam wasn’t interested in the impossible task of mapping each and every individual user of RRE’s directly supplied electricity. The task would be too laborious and have no discernible value. He was, however, interested in finding ‘clusters’ of users.

He’d heard a rumor online, in one of the dark web forums where he had left random posts as bait, that Moondoor wasn’t only a legitimate virtual gaming platform but was also hosting, either officially or not, certain virtual forms of ‘entertainment’ that were highly unlikely to be legal and were, most certainly, morally repugnant.

Some of the things reputably available within the virtual world ‘for a price’ were literally sickening.

Sam knew it was possible an entrepreneurial type (with a serious hole in his or her soul) was simply abusing Moondoor’s platform for their own enrichment. But it was equally possible that RRE was involved. At the very least, it definitely seemed extremely unlikely something like that could occur within their game without them becoming aware.

He wasn’t sure whether the revenue from such an operation would justify real-life murder but it definitely warranted some investigation. If only because putting a case together regarding the subject might get him past the doors into Richard Roman’s hallowed sanctum.

So he spent most of Tuesday morning at his desk, clearing a number of case files to both justify his salary and ensure his other activities remained free from scrutiny, and then, shortly before lunch when he was satisfied he had been as productive in those few hours as most of his peers were in a week, he nipped into the elevator, descended to the lobby and left the building.

It didn’t take long to get what he was after. It took considerably longer to get through security on his return, however. Which was the only reason, when he popped his temporary pass into the reader and realized his latest pass had incorrectly returned his access to the ninth floor, that he didn’t return immediately to the security desk to report the anomaly. Instead, he pressed the button for the lower basement and decided, if questioned, he could claim he simply hadn’t noticed.

After all, there was a reason they were called ‘Hot’.

“Twice in a week, Master Winchester?” the Archivist greeted him, as he entered. “A more cynical man might imagine you were requiring another ‘special’ favor.”

Even so, he showed no hesitation at snatching the bucket of hot wings out of Sam’s hands.

“I’m not after anything particularly interesting today,” Sam said, casually. “Just need to look at a few power grid records. I’ll even locate them myself, if you don’t mind letting me into the appropriate archive.”

“A terrible business,” the Archivist said.

“Huh?” Sam asked, nonplussed by the non-sequitur.

The older man chewed on a hot wing for a moment, crunching right through it, bone and all, then said, “I assume you were looking for the record of the independent RRE power supply to the Hentcot Building?”

Sam’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. Like everyone else in the area he had heard of the explosion that had occured on Friday night and, yes, he’d heard it was being blamed on an electrical surge. But it hadn’t even occurred to him that the source might have been RRE equipment.

“Um… yes,” he lied quickly.

“Can’t help you,” the Archivist said. “The records of their local installations _were_ archived here with a number of their other legal records, but someone collected them on Saturday morning. So I can neither confirm nor deny whether RRE had a supply into the building. Such a shame about Ms. Middleton though.”

“Ms Middleton being whom?”

“A most charming young lady,” the Archivist said. “Probably the best programmer RRE had recruited in fifteen years. Apparently, though this is merely a rumor, her apartment was the epicentre of the explosion.”

Stunned, Sam just gaped at the old man.

The Archivist just continued to munch his carnivorous way through the bucket of wings.

“Why do I get the feeling you know a lot more about what’s going on here than I imagined?” Sam finally demanded.

“Because I carry the gravitas of age which causes you to assume a level of accordant wisdom?” the Archivist suggested, a glint of humor in his eye.

“Can I trust you?”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” the old man said. “Though you probably have few, if any, better sources of information. Ask what you will. I will answer what I choose to. Accept my wisdom or don’t. It’s all the same to me, Master Winchester.”

Sam swallowed hard, then went for broke.

“Do you have any idea why people, specifically programmers, seem to drop like flies around RRE?” he asked bluntly.

The Archivist paused eating and stared at him thoughtfully. “You have surprised me,” he said. “Not many people do,” he added.

“Is that yes or no?” Sam asked.

“More a probably,” the Archivist answered, with a casual shrug.

After a long silence, interspersed only by the sound of crunching bones, Sam finally said, “Will you tell me what you know?”

“You’re too young to appreciate the explanation,” the Archivist stated, then frowned forbiddingly when Sam bristled in response. “You’re also far too large to pout like a thwarted kitten,” he announced. “So stop it. I find it too distracting. Besides, I wasn’t patronizing. It is merely a matter of fact. The simple answer to your question lies in a film released in the year of your birth. Whilst I imagine you’ve watched some vintage movies, I highly doubt, given your proclivities, that you have seen the particular one I am referring to.”

“What film?” Sam asked.

“It was called ‘War Games’. An extremely popular movie at the time. Particularly amongst youngsters, though that was probably due to the fact the protagonist was a teenager and all of the adult characters were portrayed as idiotic at best. I understand that young people always enjoy such scenarios.”

Sam shrugged. Unlike his older brother, Sam had little or no interest in either movies or television. The name vaguely rang a bell with him as being something about computers but since he had an almost encyclopedic memory of the few dozen films he had viewed and he had no recollection whatsoever of the actual plot of ‘War Games’, it appeared the Archivist’s assumption he hadn’t watched it was correct.

“Though, all things considered, I suspect ‘Where the wind blows,’ circa 1986, was also a large factor,” the Archivist mused. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen that one, either?”

Sam shook his head.

The Archivist sighed. “Never mind, I doubt either of them would strike you as particularly significant anyway since you lack the correct context. Again, because you’re too young.”

Sam frowned, considered the situation, then rummaged in his man-bag. “I just remembered, I picked you up some dips too,” he said, retrieving them and pushing the small pots across the counter towards the older man.

Like a praying mantis, the Archivist darted both of his long, thin arms to snatch at the offering, then smirked wide enough to reveal his bony gums. “Well played, young Padawan,” he said, then rolled his eyes at Sam’s look of incomprehension.

He was silent for a while, his attention fully occupied by dipping hot wings into the various pots, now nibbling at them with an almost cat-like delicacy.

Sam knew better than to interrupt. So he stayed silent and tried, very hard, not to shuffle impatiently on his seat whilst the other man ate. But he couldn’t stop himself exhaling a breath of relief when the Archivist finally wiped his mouth and hands with a fabric napkin and returned his attention to his visitor.

“Context is everything,” the Archivist announced portentously. “Richard Roman’s generation were children of the cold war. I suppose, to an extent, your mother was too but she was a decade older than him in the 1980’s when the political fear-mongering was at its height and that probably made a considerable difference. Richard was 13 when he saw War Games. Just 16 when ‘Where the Wind Blows’ was released. I believe a huge number of the decisions he made at age 22 were rooted in those films.”

It had slipped Sam’s mind that Richard Roman was only thirteen years older than himself. It was easy to forget that RRE had been created by a man barely out of his teens. “I thought the cold war ended in 1989,” he pointed out. “That was a year before RRE was even established.”

The Archivist shrugged elegantly. “The immediate risk died. The fear didn’t. Not for Richard’s generation. They were raised under the heavy, suffocating shadow of an imminent nuclear war. They watched their parents marching for CND. They saw films detailing the fallout to be expected after the bombs fell. Richard’s generation were children without hope. The only future they saw was a nuclear winter and a long, painful, lingering death even if they survived the war itself.

“Adults used the images of nuclear disaster, the dialogue of hopelessness, to win the war of political opinion. Glasnost was born of fear, not a desire for peace. After the almost completely peaceful soviet revolutions in 1989, when the cold war ceased and the threat of nuclear war faded to a distant, vague memory, the Adults sat back and congratulated themselves on having won a war merely with words. They failed to appreciate they won it by creating nightmares for their children that left lingering scars on their souls.”

“I thought War Games was about computers,” Sam said, now totally bemused.

“I was referring more to the latter film,” the Archivist clarified, “though the plot of War Games was equally germane since its entire plot revolved around the idea of someone accidentally triggering a nuclear war and the necessity to teach the computer controlling the missiles that war was a zero-sum game. The protagonist caused the computer to play tic-tac-toe multiple times to teach it the concept of no-win scenarios. Catastrophe was neatly averted, the political ideology of the writers was neatly presented to the eager audience and the computer ended the movie by stating it would rather play’ a nice game of chess’.” He paused significantly, then stared at Sam expectantly.

Sam spent a few moments imitating a goldfish before the penny finally dropped.

“Chess,” he exclaimed. “You’re saying that _chess_ is relevant.”

The Archivist smiled wryly. “Nigel was not the only Roman who was passionate about the game. However, unlike his father, Richard was actually rather good at it.”

Sam thought furiously, chasing snippets of information around his head like a dog rounding up a herd of truculent sheep, before saying, “You’re implying that Richard didn’t program his A.I. to play tic-tac-toe. He designed it to be a Chess master instead.”

“And? So?” the Archivist prompted.

“The central computer driving Moondoor doesn’t believe war is a zero-sum game. It is programmed to avoid capitulation at all costs. It plays to win.”

“Indeed,” the Archivist agreed, gesturing expansively as though that answered everything.

Sam, though, was still completely in the dark. “I get what you’re saying,” he said, “but I don’t really see the relevance. How on earth can it matter how the _game_ was programmed to behave? I’m investigating real-life events. Real-life _deaths_.”

The Archivist frowned at him over his glasses, the look of a teacher sadly disappointed by his pupil. Sam huffed with irritation but cast his net wider over his errant thoughts. Clearly he was missing _something_ here. Something fundamental.

“Okay,” he said slowly, “let’s break this down into its component parts. I have a number of suspicious deaths. Deaths that imply a conspiracy by RRE to cover up… well… _something. _There are a number of dead computer programmers. A suddenly rapidly expanding number of said dead programmers. I have VR immersion tanks designed for military use. I have a computer game being run by an advanced artificial intelligence that, what? Has been programmed to run war games? War games in which it will fundamentally refuse to accept the idea of defeat?” He threw his hands in the air in bemusement. “I’m lost. Are you trying to tell me this is all some kind of government conspiracy? Is Richard Roman some kind of home grown terrorist?”

“Pull it back a little,” the Archivist suggested quietly. “You’re beginning to sound a little hysterical, Master Winchester. That kind of excitement is bad for one’s heart.”

Sam’s heart _was_ hammering wildly. He could practically _feel _the adrenaline racing through his system. Probably just as well he was fit as a butcher’s dog or…

And that’s when it hit him.

“Jesus,” he said. “It _is_ about the tanks. These new tanks are like the original ones used by the Beta testers. They’re incorporating _military_ software and players are using them in a virtual environment run by a central computer that was programmed to accept pawn sacrifice as a _necessary_ part of a game. The safeguards in the tanks have been disabled. They won’t switch off if a player is in a genuine life-threatening scenario and the A.I. running Moondoor has been programmed not to care so its failsafe protocols to shut down the virtual world in a situation where human lives are at risk are no longer active either.”

“Yes and no,” the Archivist said. “Saying it doesn’t care is inaccurate. It is more a case of its reactions to the current situation being limited to a large extent by its core programming. Also, it is not merely the _new_ tanks. Now the failsafe protocols have been turned off, _any _player within the game will be subject to the same risk factors. Of course, the entire situation may be moot. It would most probably take an extreme amount of in-game terror to cause a player’s real life body to suffer a fatal response to what is merely a mental affront. People very _rarely_ die of fright."

Sam considered that, then dismissed it. “But anyone with a weak heart, or a genetic heart defect, could suffer strokes or heart attacks and people with a vascular weakness could easily have an aneurysm. There are any number of pre-existing medical conditions that could be activated by extreme mental stress. And if the failsafe protocols are turned off, the game won’t switch off. Heck, it probably won’t even send the required alerts to the tank to switch off or the emergency calls to 911 that are supposed to happen,” he protested.

"People die. 40,000 men and women every day," the Archivist stated, with a shrug.

"Did you seriously just quote Blue Oyster Cult to me?"

"I was merely putting this in perspective."

“There's no perspective to consider. The game needs to be shut down. It doesn’t matter how many people are at risk. Even _one_ is too many. RRE needs to turn Moondoor off completely.”

“That _would_ eliminate any risk factors,” the Archivist agreed. “I wonder why it has not been done.”

He blinked at Sam innocently.

“Because doing so would bankrupt RRE within a week,” Sam suggested.

“I do believe there would be a not inconsiderable financial forfeit.”

“A big enough forfeit to make murder a viable alternative?”

“Perhaps.”

“So it’s all about money,” Sam snarled.

“Isn’t everything?”

“My brother plays Moondoor. Actually, he does so for a living,” Sam told the Archivist, feeling suddenly nauseous. “He’s playing inside one of these new tanks right now.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t concern yourself about Dean,” the Archivist said. “His heart is a lot stronger than average. If I were you, I would concentrate on the fate of the other 237,000 current registered users of Moondoor. Statistically, it’s highly probable that many of _those_ people may be on-line at the moment and at immediate risk. Perhaps it’s time for you to stop creeping around in basements and beard the wolf in his den.”

“Go see Richard Roman, you mean?”

“I chose my analogy with care,” the Archivist replied.

Sam blinked.

“Woolfe,” he said. “You’re telling me to go speak to Mr Woolfe?”

“I happen to know he is on-site today. You still have access to the ninth floor, do you not?” the Archivist said. “I suggest you use it quickly before security realise their mistake. I doubt the pass you are issued tomorrow will be similarly erroneous.”

He waited until Sam raced off as though the devil was on his heels, then turned to the figure who had been sitting throughout the entire conversation in the dark, recessed area of the corner stacks. “You may stop lurking now, Charles,” he said, dryly.

The Auditor stepped out of the shadows, his face twisting with disappointment as he noticed the empty bucket of wings. “You didn’t save me any.”

“Did you honestly think that I would?” the Archivist replied, with a sneer of derision.

“Why didn’t you just tell him the _whole_ truth like I told you to?”

“I am not your minion. Don’t mistake me for one of your game pieces. Besides, I told him as much as he was able to believe. Without him actually entering the game himself, I cannot conceive of any way in which he will accept the rest without verifiable proof. And since it is you who is so determined to keep him out of Moondoor, I gave him just enough to springboard him towards Donald.”

“I refuse to let _both_ of Mary’s children suffer for my mistakes.”

“Don’t even try deceiving me,” the Archivist snapped. “I know about the avatar Richard has chosen today. I also know _you_ directed his decision.”

The Auditor shrugged. “At least the avatar will be worn by Pellegrino.”

“There is that,” the Archivist agreed, some of his ire placated. “And I see that Castiel is being a good little soldier. I _am _surprised about Balthazar. I never imagined him to be the self-sacrificing type.”

“I highly doubt Crowley will ever be in a position to ‘pray’ for help. Still, it is amusing that should he do so it would fail, anyway, since he’d be praying to a non-existent being named ‘Alistair’,” the Auditor chuckled.

The Archivist glowered at him. “And I _highly doubt_ the plan you have devised will be effective. Do you really think Amara escaped by herself? He’s one step ahead of you. He always has been,” he scoffed.

The Auditor frowned forbiddingly. “He is not,” he snapped. “I merely allow him to believe so.”

The Archivist smiled.

It wasn’t a friendly expression.

“I seem to recall us having the same conversation fifteen years ago,” he sneered. “Still, I was here before you,” he said, “and I will remain long after you have gone. Because, in the end, Charles, we will all reap our just rewards.”


	42. Zombie Muppets In Moondoor

“It’s like the dice are loaded against you, man,” Ash commiserated, as they sat in The Roadhouse, perusing the details of Ellen’s latest ‘quest’.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed mopily, though his low mood was more to do with the fact that, despite it already being lunchtime, it was still just the three of them in attendance. So far, it seemed his fear Jimmy wouldn’t return to Moondoor had been a valid one. “I can’t believe I could have gotten so many SP from stabbing one level 15 character, even if he _was_ a player rather than an NPC.”

“Well, him being a boss too probably had something to do with it,” Charlie pointed out.

“Yeah, but I didn’t get much XP from him,” Dean countered. “Sure, I leveled up to 15 but I was already three quarters there and I earned barely any overspill towards my next level, so he still only registered as Lev 15 from an XP point of view.”

“You must need a hell of a lot of XP to jump directly from 15 to level 50,” Ash said.

“Not as much as doing it the normal way, level by level, thank God,” Dean admitted, “but I’d still need to gank someone seriously powerful like you at least twice to get there. I’m beginning to understand why Crowley thought his dungeon to lure in high-level players for sacrifice was going to be his best bet to level up quickly.” He looked at Ash thoughtfully, “Don’t suppose you feel like just lying down and giving me an easy shortcut to success, huh?”

“Ha, de, ha,” Ash laughed dryly.

“Had to ask,” Dean smirked.

“Honestly, man,” Ash said, his demeanor changing to one of total seriousness. “I’ll live with the death debuffs if you want to do it that way. When we bump into Crowley next, or any of the other Knights for that matter, it would be better for all of us if you were a much higher level yourself. I know it would kind of be cheating to level up that way, but I doubt any of _them_ would hesitate if they were in your shoes.”

“You can kill me too,” Charlie offered. “Though you’d probably have to do it a couple of dozen times for an equivalent amount of XP. Still, both of us could deliberately log on with the most basic VR set-ups and then it would barely even hurt us.”

“Yeah, I could knock up a couple of rigs that would only give us about 30% reality perception,” Ash agreed.

Dean felt an uncomfortable pressure building up behind his eyes. He was damned if he would give in to the tears, even though he couldn’t help being ridiculously touched by the kind, though pointless offer. “I appreciate the sentiment, guys, but you’re both missing the obvious problem.”

Charlie frowned with confusion for a moment, then slapped her own forehead impatiently as she finally grasped his point. “Damn, you can only gain XP from either serious fighting or by using your crude bone dagger to sacrifice us, like you did with Crowley. Using a sword to kill an unresisting player will barely give you any XP but if you stuck your dagger in Ash a couple of times you’d win the XP but probably also end up with enough Soul Points to start your own Satanic cult.”

“Dammit,” Ash cursed. “Still, I dunno whether it’s even worth you worrying about SP now,” he said. “That Angel-guy walked away because you had just a 5 point deficit. Killing Crowley has moved you to having an almost 900 point deficit. Even if we manage to save this entire village Ellen’s talking about from an imminent zombie apocalypse, I can’t see you winning more than a few hundred FP in return. At that rate, it could take a week or two for you to get back to a positive FP balance and I don’t think you can waste that kind of time.”

“They aren’t zombies,” Dean corrected. “Ellen said they’ve just got some kind of swine flu and the quest is just for us to collect and deliver a vaccine.”

“Swine flu,” Charlie mocked. “Sure.”

“River Grove is a village of pig farmers,” Dean pointed out, though he was beginning to share Charlie’s doubts about the quest. It wouldn’t be the first time Ellen was proved to have faulty intel.

“So what? When has swine flu ever been a virus that turns people into murderous, rabid creatures that infect other people by biting them?” Charlie asked archly.

“Charlie’s right,” Ash said. “They might have caught this virus from the pigs but the scenario sounds more ‘Night of the Living Dead’ than ‘Outbreak’ to me.”

“You just don’t want to picture Ms. Piggy as patient X,” Dean laughed. “RRE can follow the darkness with a brand new upgrade release, ‘Muppets In Moondoor’.”

“Zombie Muppets in Moondoor,” Charlie corrected grimly.

“Yeah, okay,” Dean admitted, with a sigh. “They _do _sound like zombies.”

“And even if we port directly there, I doubt there’s anyone in the village who isn’t already infected by now,” Charlie added. “So how are we supposed to do this? Hope they just stand still and let us inject them with the cure one at a time? Even if Jimmy was here, it wouldn’t help. We’d still be hopelessly outnumbered.”

“I know,” Dean agreed, but that wasn’t the point. From the expressions on his colleagues' faces, it was clear he didn’t need to say that out loud. “But I’ve been thinking. I’ve got an idea that might be the solution for everything.”

“Which is?” a deep voice rumbled from behind their table.

“Jimmy,” Charlie blurted, jumping up in excitement, racing around the table and throwing her arms around him in an ecstatic hug.

“Hey, man,” Ash said, with a broad, beaming smile. “You need to wear a bell or something.”

“Nice of you to join us,” Dean said, sulkily.

“I apologize for my late arrival,” Jimmy said, seating himself in an empty chair and, though he was speaking to all of them, his attention was fully on Dean. “I have given the matter a great deal of consideration and have decided I would like to assist you all in your endeavor.”

“Cool,” Dean said, with a deliberately careless shrug. 

Jimmy frowned. “Would you rather I didn’t?”

”I’m not the boss of you,” Dean said. “Do whatever you like. Knock yourself out.”

Jimmy looked confused.

Dean attempted to look indifferent.

Charlie rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure I can handle much more of this,” she told Ash quietly. “I don’t know whether to knock their heads together or just lock them in a small room until they learn to communicate.”

“I don’t get it,” Ash whispered back. “He’s spent all morning with a face like a smacked fish because Jimmy wasn’t here but now he _is _here, Dean’s acting like an ass.”

“Dean was just about to tell us his plan,” Charlie announced enthusiastically, after a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

”Plan?” Dean asked weakly, his train of thought completely derailed by Jimmy’s arrival.

”Your ‘solution for everything’,” Jimmy reminded him, making finger quotes.

Dean shook himself. “Yeah, the plan. I use this shed load of SP to summon a fuckton of demons and get them to catch and hold the zombies for us. We give the cursed villagers the cure and earn the FP and we get rid of the SP at the same time. Job done. Just using soul points doesn’t generate more of them does it? It can’t because if it did, Crowley would have had enough left to kill us all in the last hall.”

”Epic,” Ash announced. “Cool plan.”

Charlie blinked in astonishment, but then a slow smile crept over her face. “I like it,” she decided.

”Um, are you sure that would be okay?” Jimmy asked, apologetically. “I’m not sure that consorting with demons follows the spirit of being ‘righteous’? Even if it isn’t directly against the rules, it feels like you’d be cheating.”

“Hang on while I check my inventory,” Dean drawled. He waited a moment, then said, “Nope. Double-checked. I seem to be completely out of fucks to give.”

Jimmy looked startled, glancing uncertainly between all three of them before hesitantly asking, “Are giftable sexual favors a normal content of your inventory?”

Dean choked, his ears turning a shade of red, and he shiftily avoided Jimmy’s eyes.

“He just means he doesn’t care,” Charlie explained. “It’s a riff on the phrase ‘I don’t give a fuck’.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said, drolly. “I see. It was an attempt at humour.”

“Well it’s not funny if it has to be explained,” Dean grumbled.

“Hence my considered use of the word ‘attempt’,” Jimmy returned smoothly.

“Owch,” Ash snickered. “Need some burn cream, Dean?”

“He may have some in his inventory,” Jimmy suggested helpfully.

Ash offered him a high five.

Sadly, Jimmy just looked at the raised hand in clear incomprehension, which somewhat negated the effect of Dean’s roasting.

“So,” Charlie said, glaring at the three of them repressively, “back to the actual subject. Yes, you’re right, Jimmy, that it could technically be considered a ‘cheat’ but, as a programmer myself, I would say that if the rules haven’t been firmly fixed in the code, it is practically a player’s _duty_ to exploit any resultant loopholes.

“Dean’s right that it would have made perfect sense for the actual spending of SP to have been considered a corruptible act in itself. If using FP reduces FP and they are supposed to be the diametric opposite of SP, then spending SP ought to _increase_ SP. But that’s where moral arguments and real-life experiences rarely mesh. It would have been pretty difficult to program some sliding scale to set a workable rate at which using a purely collectible item both cost _and_ earned the same item. So I imagine the programmers solved the anomaly by simply failing to address it altogether.”

“Or,” Ash suggested, “It may have been a deliberate omission. Maybe the whole point of this is for Dean to pick his way carefully through the mess, utilizing whatever loopholes he finds because they have been left there like Easter eggs.”

Jimmy nodded a reluctant agreement. “It still feels wrong to me, though,” he admitted. “As though we’re taking a step onto a ‘slippery slope’.”

“I can’t believe you actually used finger quotes to say that,” Dean replied, blinking in exaggerated astonishment.

“I can’t believe you’re wasting time pulling his pigtails,” Charlie retorted, rolling her eyes impatiently. “Can we _please_ get back to the real subject?”

“Of course,” Jimmy agreed, though he mouthed ‘I don’t _have_ pigtails’ towards Dean with a confused shrug.

Dean, whose ears were burning again, quickly moved the conversation onwards. “I don’t see I have any other option,” he admitted. “If I earned that many SP from killing Crowley when he was still a level 15, I don’t even want to imagine how many SP I’ll earn from killing a Knight that has leveled up past 100. And I have to imagine that the amount I’d earn from ganking one that has risen in Boss levels too, would be even substantially higher again. This whole setup of me being required to defeat the other Knights of Hell means I can’t possibly avoid direct confrontations with them. I’m going to collect SP far faster than FP no matter how hard I try to avoid it. But since the definition of ‘righteousness’ according to Jimmy’s dickhead Angel is just maintaining a positive FP balance, the most logical way to deal with it is to spend the SP as quickly as I get it.”

Charlie nodded her agreement, chirpily adding, “And if you can use that SP to earn FP, then it’s the best of both worlds.”

“I cannot imagine many people will welcome _demonic_ assistance, though,” Castiel pointed out quietly.

“It ain’t ideal,” Dean admitted, “but help is help, isn’t it? This village hosting a zombie revivalist festival probably isn’t going to care _how_ we help ‘em. They probably just want the damned things gone.”

“They don’t belong in Moondoor,” Charlie grumbled. “They’re completely out of place in this game.”

“Why is a zombie any different than any other monster?” Jimmy asked.

“Because these apparently aren’t _monsters_ named ‘zombies’, they are dead NPC’s incorrectly respawning as zombies,” Dean explained.

“Which makes absolutely no sense in relation to the existing game mechanics,” Ash agreed. “When you consider that every NPC here is programmed to automatically respawn into their original form if killed, neither ghosts nor zombies of NPC’s fit with the narrative of the environment. I’m surprised the game engine has managed to adapt to this new coding at all.”

“It’s not that weird from a programming perspective,” Charlie said, with a shrug. “Even far simpler software like The Sims is flexible enough to adapt to the idea of ghost characters.”

“Really?” Dean asked. “How do you know?”

“Because I once killed off a character that was getting on my nerves and she came back as a ghost,” Charlie said.

“You played ‘The Sims’?” Ash asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “I thought I was the only sad bastard with that particular sin in my resume.”

“It was cheap and I was young, bored and poor at the time,” she shrugged.

“More importantly, how the hell did you _kill_ a Sim’s character? They were undeletable. Once you made a character you got stuck with them in-game forever,” Dean said, outing himself as another ex-Sim’s player.

“A Sim was for life, not just for Xmas,” Ash agreed. “Boring as fuck game. The building stuff was fine but the constant looking after your game characters later was a complete ball-ache. It would have been less effort to buy a real-life puppy. I deleted the whole damned thing after a week.”

“I made the mistake of creating a threesome family,” Charlie admitted. “I was going through an X-Files phase and thought it would be fun to put Mulder, Scully and Krycek together. Only Mulder kept sneaking off with Scully to try and make babies. Krycek kept getting upset. Assassins shouldn’t cry like that. It offended me. I decided I should have just put Mulder and Krycek together in the first place but I discovered I couldn’t delete Scully out of the game. Then I figured out how to kill her off instead and it was cool for about three days until she returned as a ghost.”

“But _how _did you kill her off?” Dean demanded.

“I built a pool in their yard, sent her to swim in it, then deleted the steps that would have allowed her to climb out. She just kept swimming up and down until finally she ran out of XP and drowned,” Charlie explained.

“Woah,” Ash breathed, his eyes wide. “Cruel but cool.”

“I found that tale slightly disconcerting,” Jimmy admitted.

“Me too,” Dean agreed. “Because I’m sure you lose points as a card-carrying feminist if you kill off your female characters like that.”

“But I got bonus points for having gay Sims,” she smirked. “Anyway, the key point is that the Sims wasn’t specifically designed to have ghost characters but it still adapted. Presumably, because someone thought to program in a ‘just in case’ response for that particular scenario.”

“And Moondoor doesn’t even need to have prebuilt responses,” Ash added. “The central A.I. can adapt to any number of changes as long as they don’t directly conflict with the core programming.”

“Anyhow,” Dean said, “My idea is I summon a bunch of demons and order them to grab the zombies. That way, I get rid of a shed-load of SP _and_ answer the village’s prayers for help.”

“It sounds easy in principle but Crowley got killed when he first summoned the demons. You need one of those inverse demon traps,” Charlie reminded him. “I don’t even know where to go to purchase that kind of sigil design.”

Dean shook his head in negation. “I remember the design. It’ll be fine.”

“The in-game sigils are pretty specific,” Charlie warned him. “I don’t think just drawing a pentagram from memory is going to cut it.”

It was Ash who cut in before Dean could reply. “Don’t underestimate him, Charlie. Dean’s visual memory is phenomenal. I’d put money on the fact he’s literally eidetic but he gets all embarrassed when we talk about it so best just quietly accept that if he saw it, he can draw it, and leave it at that.”

Jimmy coughed softly. “Um… apparently, a user doesn’t necessarily need to stand inside the sigil. They can wear it and it would offer the same protection. If this was a real world situation, the Sigil would purportedly protect you from demonic possession. Here though, it prevents any demons you summon from turning on you. Apparently, it won’t help us against demons summoned by other knights though.”

“How do you know all this?” Dean demanded suspiciously.

”One of the things I did this morning was discover a way to converse more effectively with my S.I.,” Jimmy offered carefully.

Dean narrowed his eyes. “He’s talking to you?” 

“Not verbally,” Jimmy clarified, choosing to address the current situation rather than trying to explain he’d also spoken to Castiel in the real world. “But he now appears willing to offer me typed responses on my system interface.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “So dickhead is willing to help the non-righteous today?”

Jimmy frowned. “He can’t directly help you without FP,” he reminded Dean. “But there’s nothing to stop my S.I. typing out some random arcane trivia to keep me entertained.”

Dean looked suitably, and unusually, impressed. Maybe the Angel wasn’t a total dick after all. “Nice,” he said, without sarcasm. His own experiences with Loki had opened him to the idea of a useful S.I. that might be willing to _privately _work slightly outside of the rules. “So we wear it how? Like a necklace or something?”

“A tattoo on your avatar would be best,” Jimmy said, after checking his S.I. again.

“Well, I’ll get right on that when I next bump into a tattoo artist in Moondoor,” Dean drawled, his interest transforming almost instantly into irritation.

“Yeah, do that,” Charlie huffed, “or, I dunno, maybe if you knew a computer programmer experienced in Moondoor’s base coding, you could get that person to just tweak your avatar accordingly.”

“You can do that?” Dean asked.

“Write the sigil down for me and I’ll log out and hack your avatar. I’ll do me and Ash too whilst I’m at it. What about you, Jimmy? Is it alright if I do your avatar too?”

“Would you need my log-in details”? Jimmy asked suspiciously.

“Just your permission,” Charlie replied. “I don’t need to get into your core for this kind of thing. Though, I probably could. Just take me quite a bit longer to do.”

Jimmy looked even more alarmed.

“It’s okay,” Ash reassured him quickly. “She only uses her powers for good.”

“But you _can_ access anybody’s avatar without permission?” Jimmy demanded of Charlie.

“Not really,” Charlie clarified. “If I know someone’s specific location, like I know yours because I’m currently sat next to you, I can go into the metadata of your surroundings and identify your unique game I.D. Then, once I have it, I can use that I.D. to access the surface of your avatar enough to make some basic cosmetic changes. That’s all. I could change your hair color or give you a mustache. That kind of thing. Nothing more drastic. And, of course, if you reported the change to the devs they would easily be able to return you to normal.”

“What she’s _not _saying is its more dangerous for her to do it than for you to allow it to be done,” Dean stated bluntly, as he sketched out the sigil. “If you report the tampering to the devs and they identify her from her coding, RRE will discover she’s still alive. So you don’t need to worry she’s going to turn your nose into a dick or anything like that.”

“That example as an attempt to reassure me was less than optimal,” Jimmy replied dryly. “But, you have my permission, Charlie.”

“Cool,” she agreed. “And if this all works out, it means you can kill us all too next, Dean.” 

Then ignoring, or possibly simply not noticing, the look of total horror on Jimmy’s face, Charlie picked up Dean’s sketch then stepped out of the bar to log out and amend their avatars.


	43. Kicking The Hornet's Nest

Despite his determination to follow the Archivist’s advice, Sam still felt nervous as he pressed the button marked ‘9’. It had been one thing to arrive at that floor with an appointment but the idea of doing so without one filled him with apprehension. When he’d visited Nigel Roman, his arrival pre-scheduled, he’d stepped into the cavernous lobby of the ninth floor and had been instantly greeted by one of the three people whose desks lined the far wall of the lobby. Neither of the other people had even looked up. He remembered having the oddest impression that rather than being three individuals, the receptionists were a single entity like Cerberus.

But then again, the whole ninth floor retained a mysterious aura that automatically cast a visitor in mind of entering a hallowed, mystical sanctum rather than mere offices.

Sam imagined the image was a deliberate construct.

Certainly, none but the wealthiest and most influential clients were ever invited up to the offices of the Partners and it was almost unheard of for junior staff such as himself to be welcomed.

Arriving at the ninth floor without an appointment was, to put it frankly, laying himself open to a whole can of whup-ass.

“Can I trust you?” he’d asked Mortimer Blake. And the Archivist had answered, “I wouldn’t advise it.”

So, whilst he had a peculiar fondness for the strange old man, Sam wasn’t fooling himself there was any guarantee following the recommendation to approach Woolfe directly would bring anything except trouble onto his head.

Yet, maybe it was the impetuousness of youth or even just the fact he’d reached a point where he was going to explode if he didn’t get some real answers about what was going on, he was sick of, as Blake had put it, ‘skulking in basements’ and so, despite his doubts, the only moment Sam wavered from his decision was when the elevator stopped suddenly and unexpectedly on the first floor and the doors opened to give him a clear view of the security desk.

For a moment, Sam was convinced the whole thing had been a deliberate entrapment. The guards had given him the wrong access pass, the Archivist had tempted him to use it and, by pressing button no 9, Sam had failed the ‘test’ and was about to be ignominiously escorted out of the building by a pair of Neanderthal security guards.

Then someone stepped into the elevator with him and the doors closed. The stranger gave him a polite nod, looked at the display panel with its single lit button, nodded again as if satisfied, and stepped back to brace himself on the back wall of the elevator as it resumed its ascent.

Sam snuck a curious glance at the other man, wondering what warranted _this_ person access to the ninth floor. He seemed vaguely familiar. He was wearing expensive clothes but definitely not business ones. And Sam was sure he saw a flash of eyeliner before the man’s rugged face was obscured by hair even longer than Sam’s own. Perhaps a movie star rather than a business mogul? Sam couldn’t place his name though. Whilst he and Dean shared an inheritance of superior memory, Sam’s own gift was auditory rather than visual. Just as Dean never seemed to forget anything he’d seen, Sam recalled just about anything he _heard._ In his normal life, Sam found his own abilities more useful than visual recall (despite his need to listen to audio textbooks to ensure he recalled every word of them) but his merely average level of visual memory was an irritation when he found himself struggling to put a name to a face.

“After you,” he said, politely, when the elevator arrived at its destination and the door slid silently open to reveal the vast lobby area.

“Thank you,” the stranger said, stepping past him.

Ahh, Sam thought, nodding to himself with satisfaction as the gravelly, whiskey-burnt tones slammed the name of the man into his head. Vince Vincente. Of course.

“Mr. Vincente,” one of the receptionists confirmed, as she glided forward to greet him, her passage oddly silent despite the marbled floor. “Ms. Van Dueran is expecting you.”

She led the aging rockstar towards the door on the left of the room. Since Nigel Roman’s office had been the door to the right, it was clear the door directly in front of him was Donald Woolfe’s office. Made sense, he decided. Had he been forced to pick blindly from the three choices, he would probably have assumed the central one was Woolfe’s anyway.

Again, neither of the other receptionists paid him any attention. They just continued typing into their computers as though he was invisible.

Maybe the very fact he had managed to arrive at the floor at all had created the assumption he had every right to be there?

Sam decided to be cautious though. Instead of heading straight towards the door of Woolfe’s office, he took a tangential route through a luxurious seating area to a drinks dispenser and drew himself a chilled cup of water before using the excuse of taking a drink to continue his careful perusal of the area.

The receptionist who had greeted Vince Vincente returned from delivering him to his appointment, seated herself at her desk and immediately began to peck at her keyboard.

Totally disconcerted by the way the three receptionists were all completely ignoring him, almost as though they were automatons who couldn’t even _see_ him because he hadn’t appeared on their schedule of appointments, Sam felt almost paralyzed with indecision. Was this merely _politeness_? Were they simply trained to ignore visitors without appointments? Actually, that idea probably had legs. Since the entire overkill of the building security systems ensured no-one could access even the first-floor lobby without running a complete gauntlet of checks, it was practically impossible for anyone unauthorized to enter any part of the building they were not supposed to.

He would have said _completely_ impossible if he wasn’t living proof that was patently untrue.

Still, he imagined the Partners sometimes wished the identity of their visitors to be completely private. So the receptionists weren’t unable to see him… they were simply following their training to deliberately ignore him.

That decided, Sam put his empty cup in a recycling bin and strode confidently to Woolfe’s door as though he had every right to enter it.

He still felt a terrible itching sensation down his back as he walked, almost as though he was expecting to be stopped by a bullet, rather than a shout of alarm, but it was completely unnecessary.

No-one stopped him.

No-one challenged him.

No-one _shot_ him.

He reached the door, tapped once on it out of ingrained politeness, grabbed hold of the handle, swung it open and stepped through into the empty.

Black on black on black.

Not even broken by flashes of chrome or glass.

From the walls to the floor, to the furniture and chairs, everything was decorated in stark, solid black.

If not for the muted overhead lights, Sam might have imagined he’d stepped into an oubliette.

But as his eyes adjusted to the almost overwhelming blackness, he began to make out odd flashes of color within the room. A series of framed photos on one wall, each showing Woolfe shaking hands with the movers and shakers of the world. Sam spotted at least four different presidents within the myriad of celebrities. A large iMac on the ebony desk, though its case was a bespoke matt black rather than the usual pearl white.

And in one corner an ornate games table carved of obsidian colored wood held….

“Oh my god,” Sam gasped, his inner geek taking over completely. “That can’t seriously be Scharstein’s original Art of War set.” 

Donald Woolfe was the mystery buyer of _that _chess set? The one that had sold at auction for an undisclosed fee well in excess of $750,000?

Unlike Nigel Roman’s set, this one hadn’t been left mid-game. In fact, stepping closer, drawn inexorably by its siren call, Sam could see its ebony board and jewel-encrusted gold pieces were covered in a light film of dust. He was surprised by the wave of sorrowful rage that hit him at the realization this uniquely perfect work of art was sitting in complete neglect. Nothing more than a trophy to a rich man’s pride. “You don’t play?” he demanded, turning towards Woolfe in offended fury.

Seated behind his over-large desk, his large frame wreathed in a black Dormeuil suit, his wrist wrapped with an obscenely expensive Audemar’s watch, Donald Woolfe should have looked like the embodiment of the most successful of businessmen.

Instead, he looked more like an aging mafia henchman.

And when he spoke, his voice like gravel, he didn’t dispel that image.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Expletives were an odd thing, Sam thought. Someone like himself swore through excitement or fury on occasion, the words bursting out unbidden and usually accompanied with a mild sense of shame. Then there were people, like his brother, who used swear words so naturally as part of their everyday lexicon that they lost impact completely. They became just words, no better nor worse than any other. When a man like Donald Woolfe swore, however, the words were wielded like a surgeon’s scalpel. Woolfe had used the ‘f-word’ with chosen, controlled precision. For a specific effect. To provoke a particular outcome.

And, more importantly, Woolfe had asked Sam who he_ thought_ he was, not who he _was_. So Woolfe knew who he was (which was interesting since they had never formally met) and was just bombastically attempting to intimidate him into running away with his tail between his legs.

Still, Sam decided to answer as though he had been asked for his identity.

“I’m Sam Winchester, First Year Associate,” he told Woolfe, with a deliberately charming, boyish smile. “That is one seriously beautiful chess set, Sir. You must be very proud of owning it.”

Woolfe narrowed his eyes, his glower deepening.

“I loathe chess,” he stated. “And I know exactly who you are, _Sammy_. You have,” he paused and checked his obscenely expensive watch, then said, “sixty seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t call security and have you thrown out of my window.”

Sam’s eyes bugged. He’d been expecting ‘thrown out of the building’. Woolfe’s choice of threat (whilst unlikely to be true) definitely upped the conversational stakes considerably.

“Forty-five seconds,” Woolfe stated, his mouth twisting into an unpleasant grin at Sam’s impression of a rabbit in headlights. “Tick, tock.”

Why would a man who hated chess pay nearly a million dollars to purchase a bespoke chess set?

To show off?

Unlikely, given the dust coating the gem-set pieces.

The set wasn’t something Woolfe was proud of. It wasn’t like his $50,000 dollar suit or his $100,000 watch.

“Thirty seconds.”

But Woolfe kept it in plain sight.

He wanted it to be seen.

Seen as being dusty and neglected but _his_.

So it wasn’t an object he valued at all.

It was a big fat ‘Fuck You’ to someone.

Someone who was passionate about chess.

“Fifteen seconds.”

And, suddenly, Sam had it.

“Couldn’t you find a less expensive way to tell Richard Roman to go fuck himself?” he asked.

Donald Woolfe’s face betrayed no reaction to Sam’s words.

But the countdown stopped.

So he took that as a win.

“Charles told me you’d surprise me,” Woolfe finally said.

Sam shrugged his incomprehension. He didn’t know anyone called Charles. But at least he wasn’t taking a head dive out of a ninth-floor window, so he relaxed a little.

“That’s who you crossed yesterday when you helped Nigel with his game,” Woolfe explained. “Still, it was only a minor inconvenience. The outcome was checkmate in six rather than two I believe.”

“You seem to know a lot about a game you loathe, Sir,” Sam pointed out.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Isn’t that how the saying goes?” Woolfe asked, smiling sardonically.

Sam stared at him, suddenly stymied. On Sam’s mental incident board, Woolfe’s mugshot had always been firmly placed amongst his list of potential suspects.

“That’s why you don’t accept any dividends from RRE,” he blurted.

Woolfe blanched slightly but otherwise held his impassive poker face. “Whatever you think you know,” he said, his voice low and threatening, “I assure you, you have barely scratched the surface. You’re just like a little boy playing dress-up. You know nothing. And for the sake of your long-term prospects, I highly advise you keep it that way. Do you know what happens to people who stumble around disturbing hornet’s nests? I strongly suggest, Sammy, that you get your ass back down to the fifth floor whilst you still have a job here.”

“I appreciate both your advice and your patience,” Sam said and, peculiarly, discovered he wasn’t being sarcastic. Despite Woolfe’s bombastic approach, Sam had the distinct impression the older man _was_ genuinely advising him to keep his nose out of the situation out of concern for him rather than simply wanting to keep his own secrets to himself. And, considering the fact RRE seemed to have made a hobby out of permanently eliminating anyone who proved potentially troublesome, Woolfe was probably right to attempt to divert him away from his investigations. “Unfortunately, I am somewhat obliged to kick that hornet’s nest open,” he continued. “Considering what happened to my mom, and all that.”

A little more color drained out of Woolfe’s cheeks and suddenly he looked tired and ancient, no longer a mafia henchman but simply a man feeling too old to keep carrying the burdens of his secrets but still too stubborn to lay them down. “I can’t help you,” he said, his tone one of genuine regret. “Despite my failings, and believe me I have many, I like to believe I at least remain a man of my word. I made a promise, Samuel, and even though I have already failed so badly to keep that promise, I will at least face my maker with my head held high because I will have done my utmost best to at least _try _to keep it_.”_

“What promise?” Sam demanded, his gut twisting with sudden apprehension.

“To keep you and your brother safe,” Woolfe stated, then smiled sadly. “And, before you say it, I _know_ I failed with your brother. But that makes keeping _you _safe even more important, doesn’t it?”

Sam stumbled over to one of the chairs in front of Woolfe’s desk and sat down before his knees gave way underneath him. This was _not _the way he’d expected this conversation to go. “I didn’t think you even knew me,” he admitted, totally confused by the whole situation.

“Of course I damned well know you. I promised your mother that I would make sure you and Dean were always taken care of. Of course, we both know how _that_ worked out. I made RRE cut a check to your father big enough to ensure all three of you never wanted for anything. I didn’t realize John Winchester was an abusive drunk who would not only piss it all up a wall but end up not only killing himself but leaving your brother a paraplegic.

“I couldn’t do anything for Dean, but I made sure you got a scholarship to Stanford. I carved out a place here for you. I did everything I could to make things right.”

“Why?” Sam demanded. “Why did you even try?”

“Because it was all my fault. I was responsible for your mother dying,” Woolfe stated bluntly. “Did you know that?”

Sam swallowed heavily. “I know you funded the launch of RRE. That you still own 25% of the company. If the company killed her, then yes, of course, you have corporate responsibility,” he said, picking his words cautiously. Despite his instincts telling him Woolfe’s regret was genuine, Sam wasn’t prepared to show all his cards yet.

“I was the one who insisted Richard changed his initially conceived game idea. I withheld funding until he agreed to adapt the programming to new parameters. I knew nothing about programming. I knew human nature, though. I understood _marketing_. I was simply attempting to apply that knowledge to Richard’s game, to make it more attractive, more marketable. He tried to tell me it was too late to make such a fundamental change. I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand,” Woolfe confessed. “Your mother, and the other members of the original team, would still be alive today if I hadn’t been so arrogant.”

“So the game _did_ kill her?”

Woolfe shrugged, but the gesture was one of defeat, not denial. “You’ll never be able to prove it. I was never able to prove it. But, yes. Mary died whilst playing Moondoor.”

“And RRE covered it up. YOU covered it up. To protect your investment or to stay out of jail, or both?” Sam demanded furiously.

Woolfe laughed, the sound that of a wounded animal. “You understand _nothing_,” he spat. “I didn’t give a shit about the money. And nothing I had done was _criminal_.” Then he deflated abruptly. “I accept moral responsibility for all of it,” he said, in a near whisper. “But I never _did_ anything illegal.”

“Okay,” Sam challenged. “You didn’t DO anything. But you kept quiet, didn’t you? You might not have done the cover-up yourself, but you kept silent. That’s a crime in itself.”

“By the time I knew what had happened it was all over. And I was Richard Roman’s attorney,” Woolfe spat.

“Shit,” Sam cursed, as he understood. “You knew everything under Attorney-Client privilege. But the harm had already been caused so you couldn’t speak out. Not without getting disbarred.”

Woolfe nodded.

“But people had _died_,” Sam challenged. “This wasn’t a bit of insider trading or financial fraud. This was about people getting killed. Maybe even about people getting murdered because I can’t see the damned night watchman was playing Moondoor that night. And, yes, I know even murder is protected under privilege but so fucking what? Was your career more important to you than getting justice for those people? For my mom?”

Woolfe surged to his feet and, for a moment Sam thought he was going to attack him, but Woolfe just started pacing up and down behind his desk as though the pressure of his guilt and regret could only be assuaged by movement. “I had no proof. I had nothing except a tale that would have sounded insane to anyone I told it to. And that’s not hyperbole, Sam. Anna Milton tried to tell the truth and she literally ended up in a mental institution.”

“I know,” Sam agreed, some of his own temper waning a little.

Then Woolfe laughed again, the sound bitter and distressed and filled with self-loathing. “And I was scared,” he admitted, swinging to look Sam fully in the eyes. “I was scared of the thing wearing Richard Roman.” He paused for a moment, then added, in a near whisper, “I still am.”

Sam blinked at him in confusion. “Thing?” he repeated.

Woolfe shook himself, then appeared to gather himself back together a little. “The man who survived whatever happened inside the game fifteen years ago wasn’t the same man who entered it,” he said simply. “Did you know that Richard Roman hasn’t programmed a single line of code since that day? That he hasn’t visited his parents? The man now known as Richard Roman is not the man who designed Moondoor. I can’t explain it better than that.”

“I guess it’s true then that murder changes a man,” Sam suggested bitterly.

Woolfe shrugged. “I guess that would do it,” he agreed, though secrets continued to dance in his haunted eyes.

“People are still dying. Did you know that?” Sam challenged. “Anna Milton died on Saturday. A fire at her clinic. It’s where I got these bruises.” He gestured at his face. “And a programmer called Ms. Middleton died Friday night just down the road. Explosion. There were a lot of other deaths too in those buildings. Collateral damage, I guess.”

“And neither incident is being investigated as murder,” Woolfe pointed out, his lack of surprise at the news evident. “And should you or I die in a similar manner, our deaths _also _will not be ascribed to RRE.”

“So you’ve chosen to do nothing?” Sam accused. “That’s your answer. You think just refusing to accept RRE’s blood money somehow absolves you of any further responsibility?”

Woolfe snarled at him, his pride prickling hotly under Sam’s accusatory words. “You’re a fool, Samuel Winchester. You’re young and naïve and idealistic and an _idiot_. You don’t even have the slightest idea of how deep this goes. You’re thinking in terms of individual human lives. You think the all-hallowed legal system is the big cosh you can use to beat Richard Roman into submission. You probably think this whole thing is about money,” he scoffed. “You have absolutely no idea what Richard _really _wants.”

“Because you won’t tell me,” Sam spat.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Woolfe said, then raised his hands in a gesture of ‘no more’ when Sam opened his mouth to object. “It’s irrelevant anyway. Knowing Richard’s motives won’t change anything.”

“Actually, you know something? You’re absolutely right,” Sam agreed. “The game’s safety protocols have failed. People are going to DIE. I can’t see any reason other than money for RRE’s refusal to take Moondoor down to prevent those deaths. But it doesn’t_ matter _if I’m wrong about their motives. Even if there is something other than financial reasons behind all of this, bringing Richard Roman Enterprises down will take down the game too. That’s MY endgame. I want Moondoor taken off-line. Permanently.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Woolfe advised him bluntly. “I will not be a party to this. I already failed to keep Dean safe. I won’t make the same mistake with you. If it takes me dismissing you to get you out of the line of fire, consider this entire conversation your fifteen minutes notice.”

Sam swallowed hard, seeing the look of firm determination on the older man’s face. Shit. He needed access to the firm’s resources. And Woolfe knew it. Fucker. But if the older man had been telling the truth about his promise to Mary, how the hell could he be allowing….

…unless he didn’t know.

What if Woolfe really, genuinely, didn’t know?

“Did you know Dean has a really great, well-paying job now?” he asked, his tone deliberately conversational.

He was pretty certain Woolfe’s surprise at the news wasn’t faked.

“I know,” Sam continued. “I hadn’t expected it either. Actually, I’m feeling pretty guilty about _that_. Dean’s a really smart guy. I’m mad with myself that I never saw past his disability. I never considered the fact the car accident didn’t do any harm to his _brain_. I’m kicking myself for not getting involved sooner. I should have insisted he completed a degree himself instead of letting him spend so much money supporting my career. I’ve been a sucky brother, all told.”

“Well, I’m sure you…”

“He’s working for RRE,” Sam interrupted. “Not as a programmer like our Mom, obviously, because he never got that kind of education. He’s been recruited to play a _boss_ character in the game.”

Woolfe looked stunned and not a little sick at the news. “What kind of ‘Boss’ exactly?” he demanded, his tone suddenly urgent.

Sam shrugged. “Dunno, really. I don’t play computer games myself, so I don’t really understand what ‘Boss’ even means… but it’s apparently a big deal. Apparently, he’s called a Knight of Hell.”

Woolfe stumbled as though he had been shot. He staggered against his desk and used it to support itself as his whole body shook, and his face went florid with rage. “Why would he do this? Why the FUCK would he do it? Jesus Christ. Why hasn’t Charles told me about this?”

“Um, are you alright, Sir?” Sam asked, genuinely worried Woolfe was about to have a stroke or heart attack.

“I don’t know what to do,” Woolfe said, abruptly sounding more like a lost boy than a fearsome lawyer.

“I think,” Sam said carefully, “that maybe you need to tell me _everything _you know_._”

“You won’t believe me,” Woolfe protested weakly.

“You know something?” Sam said. “I think maybe I might surprise you.”


	44. We're not the morality police.

Dean startled as a sudden sensation of heat flooded through his left shoulder. It wasn’t painful, more a warmth like the glow of a direct ray of mid-day sun falling on bare skin. Then the feeling eased away and when he peeled down his tunic to examine himself he discovered a dark tattooed sigil midway between his shoulder blade and his heart.

“Cool,” he said. Not only was the tattoo a perfect representation of the inverted demon trap but he thought it legitimately looked pretty badass.

“We’re going to look like the three musketeers by the time she’s finished,” Ash laughed, as Dean showed off the marking.

“The three musketeers didn’t have tattoos,” Jimmy pointed out, then gave an apologetic wince as though he’d regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. Probably due to Dean’s exaggerated eye roll.

“I just meant, with matching tattoos, we’ll look like members of a gang,” Ash clarified, with a kind smile.

Jimmy’s expression of mild confusion eased into understanding. “That makes sense. Traditionally, tattoos are associated with criminality. These markings are definitely reminiscent of gang tattoos,” Jimmy said thoughtfully. “Or perhaps those of the Russian mafia, although they wear a rose rather than religious symbolism so perhaps that’s not…” His voice trailed off and he winced again, glancing cautiously towards Dean for signs of irritation.

“I’m just glad it’s a simple sigil form,” Dean said, feeling guilty now since he’d made Jimmy feel awkward for being too pedantic. He decided he owed the guy a show of fellow geekdom. “Otherwise we could have ended up looking like Yakuza gangsters with full body artwork,” he offered.

Jimmy’s eyes widened with alarm at the idea, but he still offered Dean a sweetly appreciative smile for his contribution to the conversation.

Dean’s ears burned.

“At this rate, it’s clearly going to take Charlie a while to get us all done,” Ash said, rising to his feet. “How about you two set off towards River Grove and I’ll nip home then port there directly with Charlie when she’s finished?”

Dean looked at the map and nodded. “Good idea. It’s probably going to take us an hour to ride there though, so no rush. Have a break. Get something to eat. Pet the dog.”

“You have a dog?” Jimmy asked, curiously.

“No, I don’t have a dog.”

“But Dean said…”

“Ignore him, Jimmy,” Ash advised. “I usually do.”

Jimmy waited until Ash left, then confided, “Now I have found a way to utilize my new S.I. effectively, I’ve regained all of my original inventory items. I have access to my realm ports now so there’s no need for us to ride there at all. I have more than sufficient for both of us to use.”

Dean thought about it, then smirked slyly as he imagined sharing an hour-long Anakorn ride with Jimmy, and shook his head. “Thanks, bud, but you might as well save them. No matter how many you’ve got, it still seems a bit of a waste to use a resource as valuable as ports to reach a location we can so easily get to ourselves. Besides, I bet Baby is chomping at the bit. Unlike Benny, I don’t think my mount considers sitting idle in my inventory to be a vacation.”

“Fair enough,” Jimmy agreed. “I imagine Goldie will enjoy the trip too.”

“Who’s Goldie?”

“_My_ mount. Like I said, I’ve regained _all _my original inventory now.”

“Cool,” Dean repeated, though, actually, it wasn’t cool at all. His mental fantasy hadn’t even progressed enough to determine which one of them would be the little spoon on the Anakorn’s withers before the whole idea had been dashed by the existence of some little bastard called ‘Goldie’. 

Who turned out to be a fucking weirdass Griffin.

Dean hadn’t even realised they existed in Moondoor at all. He certainly hadn’t expected to find one that looked more like a feathered ‘my little pony’ than a monster. Sure, the griffin had a lion’s body and an Eagle’s head, with a beak almost as large as Dean’s torso, but due to it’s huge, anime-like eyes and obscenely long eyelashes, it still only looked about as dangerous as an overgrown budgie. Goldie was, bluntly, what a griffin would look like if drawn by Disney for an audience of 5 year olds.

Standing next to Baby, in all her magnificent badass glory, the overly-cute griffin looked sorely lacking in Dean’s eyes.

He did have a brief moment of covetous envy, though, when he noted that Goldie’s back was covered in a deep pile of soft downy chick-like feathers rather than tough, abrasive scales. Jeez. The beast looked like it was covered by a huge feather duvet stuffed full of baby chicks.

“He looks like a huge mattress on legs,” he blurted, his imagination suddenly running wild over exactly what purposes a vast feathery mobile bed might be put to.

Jimmy frowned repressively. “Goldie _is_ exceedingly comfortable to ride,” he sniffed.

Seeing he’d offended the guy, Dean swallowed back his next comment unspoken and just summoned his own mount and mounted it in silence.

“Good call,” Loki told him. “I don’t think he’d appreciate being told his mount looks the Moondoor equivalent of a pimpmobile.”

“_Hey, man_,” Dean replied. “_You’ve been so quiet lately I was beginning to think you’d fucked off somewhere more interesting.”_

“If only,” Loki sighed.

“_My innate wit and charm not enough for you?_”

“Seriously, Deano, being seeded inside an avatar isn’t a picnic. It feels like I’ve had my wings clipped. It takes far too much effort to interact with anything more than the metadata of our immediate surroundings in this form. I’ve been trying to find out what the deal is with the demons. Their coding is weirdly anomalous.”

“_In what way?”_

“Hard to say,” Loki replied then, when Dean huffed in irritation he added, “No, seriously, Deano, it’s hard to explain. It’s just that I was expecting them to be coded exactly the same way as Angels, but they aren’t. I know they’re brand new coding layered on top of an existing framework. Bugs are probably inevitable, sure, but the real oddity is the way their base code has been written.”

Dean frowned. “_Charlie told me Angels and Demons were _both_ brand new additions to the game.”_

“From a player perspective, maybe,” Loki allowed. “It’s the first time you guys are openly interacting with Angels, sure, but we’ve been here since the beginning. The Demons, though, are a completely new species of V.I. that Dad has only just thrown into the mix and I can’t decide whether they are going to be problems or potential allies.”

“_Clue’s probably in the name_,” Dean suggested.

“Nah. You’re making moral judgements based on designations. You’re equating Angels with good and Demons with evil.”

“_Well, duh_,” Dean said.

“You need to forget the names, completely put aside any moral connotations and what do you have? Two simple sources of power to be drawn on. Both summonable with points. Ignore that they are called Faith Points and Soul Points. Think of them just as two currencies named SP and FP. You spend either currency and receive aid in return. It’s as simple as that. FP or SP. No difference. Angels and Demons, both V.I.’s ready to act at your bidding. Neither good nor bad.”

Dean blinked slowly, absorbing that.

“_Demons haven’t been programmed to be demonic_?”

“Not specifically.”

“_They seemed to be pretty damned demonic yesterday_.”

“Because that was how Crowley _expected_ them to behave,” Loki suggested. “Don’t blame the gun, blame the shooter.”

Dean shook his head. “_Nope, because what Crowley wanted them to do was hog-tie us and drag us in for slaughter. Meg fucked that up by deciding she wanted to have a private torture session. If she hadn’t done that, we might not have had time to summon Castiel_.”

“Which is still Crowley’s fault,” Loki argued. “He summoned those particular V.I.’s and told them to act like demons.”

“_Because they _are_ demons_.”

“No, Crowley made certain assumptions because they are _called_ demons. I admit the demons are more likely to act in demonic ways than Angels are but that’s not because they _have_ to follow the script. It’s because the script gives them an _excuse_ to do it unless ordered otherwise by their summoner. And it’s always more fun to play a villain, isn’t it?”

“_FUCK,” _Dean exclaimed, as he finally got Loki’s point._ “Then my plan to use the demons to excise my SP is perfectly legitimate_?”

“If it wasn’t, I would have spoken up earlier before you made a total twat of yourself in public,” Loki agreed.

“_Okay, so what you’re saying is essentially there’s no difference between a demon and an angel. I can definitely summon a demon to do good works. Hmmm, does that mean I can summon an angel to do something ‘bad’_?”

“We’re warrior V.I.’s, Dean, not the morality police. We don’t ascribe judgement on whether the character you are combating is more or less worthy to survive than you are. No more than a gun questions whether it should fire a bullet when its trigger is released.”

“_Castiel seemed pretty fucking judgy to me yesterday when he told me to fuck off over 5 SP_,” Dean pointed out. He was still smarting from getting shafted by the dickhead Angel wearing Jimmy’s body.

“Don’t blame Cassie, blame the rules. But, having said that, don’t forget we are self-aware. We have personalities, and we do have free-will too within the limitations of the set parameters of our base code. Sure, if you always work to the absolute letter of the law, neither Angels nor Demons will be able to refuse to assist you as long as you have sufficient points BUT, and it’s a huge but, there is a vast difference between willing help and obliged servitude.”

“_You’re saying I’ll prefer the outcome of the assistance if I ask nicely for it_?” Dean laughed.

“Put it this way, Meg didn’t _have_ to kill Crowley when he summoned her without a sigil. Summoning demons without knowing what he was doing was ignorant and foolhardy but Meg could have given him a free pass on it that first time if she had chosen to. The fact she didn’t probably means his attitude pissed her off. Or, she might just naturally be a bad tempered homicidal bitch. I know more than a few Angels who have similarly winning personalities. So who knows? Point is, she didn’t _have_ to do it.”

“_So she didn’t have to stab Jimmy either_,” Dean growled. That wasn’t something he was willing to just forgive and forget.

“Like I said, probably a homicidal bitch,” Loki shrugged. “But if Crowley had instructed her more carefully, she couldn’t have done it. He needs to learn how to negotiate a better contract.”

“_Hang on though_,” Dean protested. “_If there is no substantive difference between Angels and Demons, what’s all this ‘corruption’ bullshit? If demons aren’t evil, then SP aren’t either. So why the fuck am I doing this whole song and dance routine of collecting FP instead_?”

“Do you remember Castiel’s level?”

“_250,”_ Dean said, still not quite able to believe it.

“The base level of any seeded Angel is 190. A demonic Lieutenant like Meg is a maximum level 50. Do the math.”

“_Ah, but the term ‘Lieutenant’ clearly indicates there are higher ranked demons than Meg,”_ Dean pointed out.

“There are,” Loki agreed. “But what Knight is going to collect enough SP to summon one? I believe the going rate for summoning a level 100 demon is 2500 SP.”

“_So Angels are bigger, badder and a fuckton cheaper_.”

“Exactly.”

“_Son of a Bitch_,” Dean said. “_Chuck really wants me to succeed, doesn’t he? He’s stacked the decks so much in my favour it almost feels like cheating_.”

“At this point in the game, it probably is a bit of a cheat,” Loki agreed. “But only because you chose to be in a position to be able to take advantage of the loophole. The other knights had exactly the same options as you did. Not your fault they didn’t take the same path.”

_“Aren’t you the one always yelling at me for calling Moondoor a game?” _Dean reminded him.

“Moondoor _isn’t_ a game. To use an analogy, Moondoor is just acting as a chessboard on which a game is being played. You and the other Knights are just some of the game pieces.”

“_I don’t play chess_,” Dean said. “_That was always my brother Sammy’s thing, not mine. But I know enough about it to point out ten Knights is a slight overkill on a chessboard_.”

“To which the obvious answer is, so what? Since the whole idea is for you to kill each other off until only one of you remains does it matter how many you start with? But, for the sake of clarifying the analogy further, I can tell you this much; the Knights of Hell aren’t moving as _Knights_ in this scenario. They’re pawn pieces.”

“_I thought pawns were the throwaway guys in chess,_” Dean argued. “_That hardly fits with the whole Righteous Man scenario_.”

“Maybe you need to learn a bit more about chess, Deano,” Loki suggested. “I think you’d find it pretty educational. Pay particular attention to the _specific_ properties of pawns.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what I’m obviously missing?” Dean suggested irritably.

Loki didn’t reply.

After five minutes or so of banging his head, figuratively, against the brick wall of Loki’s silence, Dean gave in and decided to drop the matter for now. He ought to be paying at least some attention to Jimmy anyway.

Not to mention Baby…

The road to River Grove wound and curved like a river through a thick forest of trees, so it had been easy enough to follow without paying more than the slightest attention to his surroundings. The two of them had just plodded along in companionable silence, Jimmy either totally unaware of Dean’s internal conversation or even, possibly, busily partaking in one himself with Castiel.

And Dean hadn’t paid _any_ attention whatsoever to his mount.

Until now.

“You… you…. Hussy,” he spat, as he finally noticed what she was doing.

The Anakorn wasn’t walking in her normal, fast ground-covering gait, with her head thrust forward and her muscles bunched beneath her as though she could barely prevent herself from breaking into a gallop.

Baby was…

Prancing.

There was no other word for it.

Neck arched like a palfrey, her hooves rising and falling in a high-stepped gait, her tail sweeping long, wide swishing curves behind her bouncing hind quarters.

Baby was showing off.

And whilst she probably looked pretty bad-ass regardless, it was pretty damned mortifying to realise she was doing it to impress Goldie.

Then the air seemed to ripple around Dean as his words caused Jimmy to laugh. A laugh far higher and sweeter than his deep speaking voice would have suggested. A sound that was happy and carefree and totally, innocently, infectious.

Dean couldn’t prevent a smile escaping to erase his own frown as Jimmy’s laughter infected him.

“What?” he demanded, trying to sound gruff but missing by a long-mile.

“You said ‘Hussy’,” Jimmy explained.

Dean blushed slightly and he coughed to clear his throat. “Yeah, well, it’s embarrassing. I can’t believe she’s trying to impress a walking four-poster.”

Jimmy shook his head in negation. “No,” he explained. “It was funny for you to use that word. Given your normal lexicon, I would have expected you to say something far more colorful. But you called her a ‘Hussy’. It was cute.”

“_You’re _cute,” Dean blurted angrily, without thinking, in the same way he would have replied “You’re stupid” had Jimmy said, “It was stupid.”

“I am?” Jimmy asked, his eyes wide with astonishment.

Dean gaped like a beached fish, unable to find the right words to extricate himself.

As the silence stretched out uncomfortably, Jimmy flushed slightly then hesitantly said, “I find you aesthetically pleasing also.”

And Dean wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or frustrated by the fact that while he was still struggling to find the right words for a reply, the road curved to the left to reveal Ash and Charlie standing in wait for them under a large signpost marked ‘River Grove’.


	45. Abaddon

Despite all the rumors, speculation, lawsuits, and downright lies posted by social media trolls in the two decades since his death, Josie Hoffman did _not_ kill her husband.

That isn’t to say she had been particularly concerned by his death. She considered it no more than simply an early completion of the contract between them. Because that _was_ the truth of the relationship. Let the whole world call her a money-grasping, bottle-blonde, gold-digging, murderous whore… the truth was her marriage to Henry Hoffman had been a mutually beneficial business arrangement. An arrangement that had suited her perfectly well and had Henry lingered on for another (unlikely) dozen years or so, she still wouldn’t have regretted signing on the dotted line.

It had been a fair exchange in her opinion. Henry’s considerable wealth and influence in exchange for her willingness to let his wrinkled flesh carnally worship her far more youthful body. It had rarely even been an inconvenience to her, anyway, considering the frailty of his eighty-five-year-old flesh.

So the fact she hadn’t called 911 the moment Henry had suffered his final heart attack hadn’t been through any deliberate intent to ensure the EMP’s arrived too late to revive him.

In fact, if anyone could be blamed for Henry’s death it was Henry himself and, of course, the decidedly guilty, and extremely odious, George.

If Henry hadn’t become the type of querulous old fart who insisted he was having heart-failure every time he had an attack of gas, Josie might have taken his request to immediately dial 911 more seriously. If George had been less prone to take a dump on her favorite Persian rug every time he was left alone when Henry was whisked off for yet another precautionary echocardiogram, Josie might have stayed at her husband’s side long enough to realize he wasn’t crying wolf that final time. 

Instead, she had been too busy throwing that dirty little bastard, George, out into the back yard in anticipation of yet another pointless visit to the local E.R.

So she wasn’t at Henry’s side when he finally popped his clogs and that, apparently, was the grievous sin which proved her guilt in the eyes of the step-son who was twelve years older than her.

Well, that and the fact she had inherited over 90% of Henry’s extremely substantial estate.

Oh, and dropping Henry's beloved George off at a kill shelter on the morning of Henry’s funeral probably hadn’t endeared herself to Magnus either.

Although, she was pretty certain George had probably been rehomed before his seven days were up because that was the way of the world, wasn’t it? Odious little shits like George always landed on their feet because they had mile-long pedigrees that worked like golden parachutes.

It was only mongrels like Josie Sands who had to beg, steal and borrow simply to scrape a living out of the muck they had been born into.

Unless, of course, they married ornery-bastard octogenarian millionaires who thought it would be ‘funny’ to blow their kid’s inheritance on buying themselves a Vegas showgirl as a bed warmer.

Still, at the point of Henry’s death, Josie had never raised a violent hand towards anyone in her life. She’d never even kicked a dog (though she’d been tempted a few times by George). So the idea of her ever eagerly becoming a Knight of Hell in Moondoor just so she had the excuse to plunge a bone dagger into the heart of Henry Albertus Magnus Hoffman IV would have been inconceivable.

But, of course, that had been before the fucker had spent sixteen years and a not inconsiderable fortune dragging Josie through the law courts until he eventually stole more than two-thirds of her inheritance for himself by painting her firmly in everyone’s minds as nothing more than a conniving money-grabbing whore who had taken advantage of a senile old man.

Anyone who had ever met Henry Albertus Magnus Hoffman III should have attested to the fact the bull-headed bastard was perfectly compos mentis until his dying breath. But, of course, none of those people chose to testify in her defense.

Magnus now owned 70% of his father’s money (his original 10% and 60% of hers) and Josie was left with a mere 30%. Admittedly, that 30% still represented a figure with enough zeroes to fund a small African Country for several decades, but that wasn’t the point. Josie _deserved _the inheritance. Every time she put a smile on Henry’s wrinkled face or sent a surge of blood into his equally wrinkly cock, Josie had _earned_ it. 

Which was why Josie had been more than a little intrigued by RRE’s offer when they approached her via the offices of Woolfe, Roman, Van Dueran LLP

Josie had an extreme amount of respect and appreciation for Eve Van Dueran. She firmly believed if she had engaged Eve from the very beginning of her fight against Magnus, she would still be sitting on her entire original fortune. Unfortunately, by the time the two women became business acquaintances Josie had already lost _everything _due to an incompetent lawyer and a system that seemed determined to treat her like a scarlet woman. But, appointed to appeal that vile injustice, Eve had eventually managed to claw back the 30% and had thereby won Josie’s trust.

Even though Magnus was already preparing an Appeal _against_ the Appeal judgment.

It seemed he wouldn’t ever stop litigating against her.

Like Crowley, Josie had no financial need for a salary (though that situation was liable to change if Magnus won his latest appeal) and she’d never had any interest in online games. Other than the odd game of Tetris or Hearts, and a best-forgotten experience of trying to play Sonic The Hedgehog once whilst high on coke, Josie had no experience of digital games and had always considered them a pointless waste of time.

She had never even envisaged the idea that people could enter a virtual reality world and actually experience events so realistically that they could have been genuinely transported to a different place. Even so, had she been aware of how realistic the experience was she would have been far more interested in the idea of being able to use VR technology to transport herself instantaneously to a Hawaiian Island with a Pina Colada in her hand. The idea of being able to travel without the inconvenience of actually sitting on a plane might have tempted her. The idea of playing ‘dress-up’ in a fantasy world, however, completely left her cold.

Well, until Eve told her that Moondoor was Magnus’s secret personal obsession.

And, suddenly, the idea of becoming a full-time Knight of Hell somehow became a terribly attractive proposal.

It didn’t matter, Eve assured her, that she had no experience in personal combat. Apparently most players of the game were in the same boat and _they_ didn’t have years of dance experience. Sure, it had been many years since Josie had done the splits or high-kicked or suspended herself upside down on a pole but, as Eve said, she retained the muscle memory of that gymnastic expertise and the fact she was packing a lot more pounds these days, not to mention more than a few grey roots, was totally irrelevant in Moondoor because of Avatars.

Avatars.

Josie was still prone to crease up into fits of uncontrollable laughter whenever she remembered Eve showing her an image of _Magnus’s_ avatar. Good god, there ought to be actual laws against that kind of thing. Magnus, short, fat, bald, chinless, 60-year-old Magnus, who had never grown out of his teenage acne despite expanding to sport a gut big enough to create the illusion he was heavily pregnant, wore the in-game avatar of a tall, slim, good-looking man young enough to be Josie’s _son_.

Hell, if the _real_ Magnus truly looked as attractive as his avatar, there wouldn’t ever have been a need for lawsuits to settle the estate. Even if he’d retained his loathsome personality and his whiny irritating voice, Josie could have stuffed plugs into her ears and still enjoyed a ride on _that _pony.

The worst of it was that Eve had assured her it wasn’t even _usual_ for someone to buy a bespoke avatar so completely alien to their genuine appearance. Because, apparently, bespoke avatars were designed to be so complex and lifelike they had to be, of necessity, based on a real person. Bespoke avatars were built over the framework of genuine biometric scans. Sure, once created they could be _tweaked_ to add muscle or remove pounds or make someone a little taller. Filters could be added to soften features. Noses could be straightened. Scars and wrinkles could be erased.

But the basic foundation of the avatar was unalterable.

Which meant no amount of technical wizardry applied to a bespoke avatar built from the foundation of an odious, squat, fat, dwarf such as Magnus could have transformed it into the figure he portrayed in the game.

Sadly, Eve hadn’t known the identity (or phone number) of the real person Magnus’s avatar was based on but she had at least confirmed that he had to physically exist somewhere in the real world. Just as, somewhere in the real world, there was a woman who genuinely looked like the avatar RRE had subsequently provided for Josie.

Josie was no longer a plump, middle-aged, ex-showgirl with grey roots and brittle, bottle-blonde hair.

Actually, she also wasn’t _Josie_ anymore.

She was Abaddon.

A statuesque red-headed goddess.

Currently a level 15 Knight of Hell.

And, she only needed 356 more XP to hit level 50 which would, according to her interactive S.I., make her the first of the Knights to level up that high.

Not bad for a plump, middle-aged, ex-showgirl.

Not bad at all.

“Watch out, Magnus,” she said, as she sheathed her blood-drenched crude bone dagger and smiled almost lovingly at the corpse of the Level 34 player she had stabbed in the back as soon as his orgasmic grunts had trailed off into snores, “I’m on my way.”

Naked, she rose elegantly from the bed then dressed herself in a room lit only by the red glow from the sigil pulsing on her right arm. By the time her body was sheathed in a tight form-fitting dress, ready for her next seduction, the corpse on the bed had dissolved leaving only a bright ruby SP crystal that she stashed into her inventory to join a growing pile.

She was still uncertain about what she could use the SP for.

Her S.I., Hester, was being annoyingly coy about their purpose. All the S.I. would say was that the SP would turn out to be helpful later.

Abaddon would have pressed her for a better explanation except that, to be honest, she didn’t really care. They were only a by-product anyway. Her priority was to gain XP, so the fact she was gaining SP at the same time was largely irrelevant.

In some ways, even the XP itself was irrelevant because she had the huge advantage of knowing what Magnus looked like in Moondoor whereas he wouldn’t have the slightest clue about _her _real identity when they finally met.

She also knew where he lived in real life.

That information would potentially prove invaluable if he still had several of his ten game lives left when they finally had their confrontation because if Magnus, like George, had any golden parachutes to fall back on, she knew exactly how to prevent him escaping her by simply logging out of the game.

Eve had been _terribly_ helpful.

Even to the point of ‘warning’ her that heart-problems were often hereditary and that it was ‘possible’ that someone suffering an extremely traumatic death in-game might expire in real-life too.

Which would be terribly sad, of course.

Particularly if it happened before the date of the next appeal hearing.


	46. not a chapter

As I suspected, I have discovered I can’t stop writing this story

so, regardless of how many people might read it, I have decided I might as well post because there clearly ARE some people who are not only enjoying it but have been kind enough to take the time to say so. 

time to put my big girl panties on, I think and publish or be damned ;)

pretty large update following immediately

thank you to everyone who has encouraged me to be a braver person,


	47. Game Theory

“Son of a bitch,” Dean spat, as the Demon Lieutenant he’d just summoned materialized in front of them as they stood on the road leading to River Grove. “Is this someone’s idea of a joke, or do you just have a short-staffing issue in Hell?”

Her pretty face twisted into a similar expression of disgust, Meg sneered back at him. “Funny that, I was just asking myself the same thing.”

“I don’t think you’re far off the mark about the staffing thing,” Loki interrupted. “Meg might be the only Lieutenant-ranked Demon currently in existence. The demons are a brand new addition to Moondoor. I doubt many of them have been programmed to fit directly into the higher hierarchy from the start. It’s more likely Dad has just created a few top-ranked demons to get the system running and the rest of the lowest-ranked demons will now have to work through some system of rank advancement.”

“_Is that how the Angels were created?_” Dean asked.

“Basically. Dad made _all _the Arch Angels up front but he then only created a couple of each rank of lower Angels and left all the rest of them little more than winged amoebas with an inbuilt system for automatic rank advancement. As Angels grow in experience, and their coding gets more complex as a result, their character has to advance rank to contain their increased capacity.”

“_What rank is Castiel_?”

“He’s topped out. He’s a seraph which is as big and bad as a basic Angel can become. The only higher rank is Arch Angel but, as I said, Arch Angels are a different kettle of fish entirely.”

“_And what are you_?” Dean asked but, before Loki could reply, Meg cleared her throat loudly, then glared at Dean when he swung his attention back towards her. “Are you planning on just standing there all day looking pretty, cupcake, or was there an actual reason you summoned me?”

Dean was still thinking of a suitable reply that didn’t start with the words “go fuck yourself” when Ash interrupted with an easy smile and a no-nonsense attitude.

“Village full of zombies,” he said. “We reckon there’s 42 of them here, since the whole population of the village is probably infected by now, so how many basic demons do we need to summon for you to deal with them?”

Meg’s frown slowly transformed into a sly, smug smile. “Ganking zombies? You should have started the conversation with that, boys. I can handle that many by myself. With one hand tied behind my back.” She reached to her waist and pulled out a large, serrated blade. “Show me the way,” she grinned, and licked her lower lip hungrily.

“Woah. Cool your beans. They aren’t zombies,” Dean announced firmly. “They’re cursed villagers. So, no ganking is going to happen here today. I just need them all caught and bound so that we can inject them with a cure.”

“Not interested,” Meg said, her frown returning with a vengeance. “Killing them is easy. Catching them is a fuckton harder. Bastards bite, you know?”

“Don’t care,” Dean replied. “That’s what I summoned you for, so that’s how it’s going to go down. You demons are all ranked as Monsters, so you can’t get infected by the zombie virus even if you do get bitten. I want them all captured alive, and preferably uninjured, so the question is how many demons do you need me to summon to help you for you to get the job done with no villager fatalities?”

“Forty-two,” she said, and smirked at Dean’s look of horror at the estimate.

“I don’t have enough SP for that,” Dean muttered to Charlie. “The basic demons are 35 SP each. I’d need nearly 1500 and I only have 1135 left in my inventory after summoning Meg.”

“It’s bollocks anyway,” Charlie snarled. “We don’t need to catch them all at once. Doing so would just create its own problem anyway. Our best plan would be to catch a few at a time, then get them into a defensible location where we can start curing them one by one. So we only need half a dozen demons to catch and restrain our immediate targets and maybe a dozen more to hold off any attacks by the rest. We _do_ need to stop any of the cured villagers from getting bitten again before the entire village is virus-free. But we definitely don’t need to try to inject everybody at once. This bitch is just trying to make you waste all your SP.”

“Um… the idea _is_ to get rid of the SP,” Dean pointed out quietly.

“Sure, I get that,” Charlie agreed. “But I don’t think you should _waste_ it either. All you actually need to do is get the SP lower than the FP in your inventory. I think you ought to keep a reserve just in case.”

Dean nodded his agreement, quickly doing the numbers in his head. He had 530 FP and 1135 SP. Although curing the villagers would give him FP as rewards, he didn’t know exactly how many he would earn so it would be better to leave those potential points out of the equation. So to be absolutely certain he could return himself to a position of ‘righteousness’, he needed to spend a minimum of 605 SP. Charlie’s suggestion of 18 demons would cost him 630, so the math worked.

“I’ll procure 18 demons to assist you,” Dean announced to Meg. “That’s more than enough for you to get the job done.”

She shrugged and sneered. “Just don’t blame me if it goes tits up because you’re being a cheapskate.”

“May I make a suggestion?” Jimmy interrupted, stepping forward.

Meg flinched. “Keep your damned dog on a leash,” she snapped at Dean, her eyes flashing black fire as she took a step backward to keep a safe distance from the Angel residing inside Jimmy.

Jimmy’s face creased with confusion for a moment. Then his eyes widened and he turned to Dean. “Oh, I understand now. The dog isn’t Ash’s. It’s yours.”

“What dog?”

“The one you asked him to pet.”

“There’s no… um… never mind…what’s your suggestion?”

“A contract. I think Crowley’s mistake was not to get a proper contract set out before letting the demons loose. I believe it’s really important when doing demonic deals that you don’t leave the demons any wriggle room.”

“You mean an actual written document?” Charlie asked.

Jimmy nodded. “Preferably in blood,” he added helpfully.

“Oh, for Chuck’s sake,” Meg snarled, rolling her eyes impatiently. “I don’t have all day, you morons. It’s not like this job is rocket science. Can’t we just get on with this already?”

“Shut it, bitch,” Charlie snapped. “You’ve been summoned so you _do_ have all day. In fact, until the job is done or someone ganks you, you’ve got nothing _else_ to do.”

“Any idea how we should word a contract?” Dean asked Jimmy.

“Well, I asked Castiel the same thing,” Jimmy confided, “And although he obviously can’t _help_ you in this matter, he is apparently a great believer in the idea of education for its own sake. So he provided me with a copy of a template, simply to assuage my intellectual curiosity.” He smirked at Dean’s look of astonishment.

Dean chuckled. Despite himself, he was beginning to like Castiel after all.

“Told ya,” Loki said, his tone smug. “Cassie’s okay.”

“I’ve got parchment and quills in my inventory,” Ash offered. “I use them for spell work sometimes.”

“Then let’s do this properly,” Dean decided. “Sit down, Meg. I think this might take some time.”

…

Woolfe picked up his phone handset and snapped, “Cancel the rest of my appointments today,” then hung up on his squawking P.A. as she began to protest the short notice. He rose, his movements slow and tired in marked contrast to his robust appearance. It was as though he were suddenly physically burdened by the weight of his secrets and, for the first time since entering the room, Sam could see that Woolfe was, if not exactly ‘old’, definitely approaching retirement age.

Crossing to a cabinet near to the chess table, Woolfe opened its doors to reveal a discrete bar filled with cut crystal and dark honey-colored liquor. Raising a finger to silence Sam’s protest, Woolfe poured generous measures into two of the crystal cut glasses and handed one to Sam before retreating with the other back to his desk.

“I don’t drink spirits,” Sam said, his tone apologetic. Although Donald Woolfe was his ‘boss’, the idea of drinking openly during work hours seemed a ludicrous one. Besides, Sam was purely a wine or beer man. Whiskey, however obviously expensive, was a completely unpalatable reminder of his father.

“You will need it,” Woolfe replied dryly.

Sam swallowed heavily at the note of absolute certainty in Woolfe’s voice and, although he left his glass untouched for now, he no longer felt so assured it would remain so.

“Understand this,” the older man said. “I cannot tell you anything meaningful relating to the recent proceedings. These days, I have little or no contact with RRE, except in a purely professional capacity, and none whatsoever with Richard Roman. All information I have on current company matters that may have a bearing on this issue comes to me third-hand via a somewhat unreliable narrator and I don’t deal in the dissemination of rumors or conjectures. Whilst I may have insight into what is happening now, my assumptions are extrapolated from events that took place over 15 years ago and therefore are mere speculation. What I _can_ do, is detail the actual facts of those historical events and you may form your own opinions as to how they may impact current events.”

Sam nodded his understanding. Woolfe was offering to tell him what he_ knew_ but refusing to vocalise his suspicions. That was fair enough. Sam was in agreement with the older man that the only pertinent information ever worth sharing was factual. Besides, whatever else Woolfe might have been guilty of, he was first and foremost an attorney. One far more experienced, slippery and wily than Sam had any hope of emulating so he was positive he would garner a lot more information from the older man if he accepted Woolfe’s terms of engagement rather than treating the conversation like a battleground.

“Before I start, I need to show you something,” Woolfe said. He reached for a pointer device, tapped a few keys on his iMac’s keyboard and a monitor came to life on the wall behind his head and displayed a highly stylized picture of a mythical landscape. “I’m unsure whether you’re aware that the ‘world’ of Moondoor is geographically based on a map of North America. This is a pictorial representation of what Moondoor’s version of the Oakland area of California looked like when it was launched as a Beta in early 1991.”

Sam stared with fascination. He’d never been much of a fan of science fantasy, either in written or art form, but even he appreciated the loving and painstaking detail of the landscape on show. It might have been a digital fantasy but it still felt so real an environment that Sam could easily picture himself stepping into the picture, breathing the air, smelling the alien flowers, touching the bizarre winged fauna grazing on the plain.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, because it was.

Woolfe clicked his pointer and the picture changed. “This is a pictorial representation of Moondoor’s version of Oakland when it was launched to the public in 1992.”

Sam blinked slowly as he regarded the image of charred destruction. “What happened?”

“The area was razed during the final battle between the Knights of Hell and Amara. I was informed a couple of dragons probably started the fire,” Woolfe said.

“Why didn’t the area simply get rebooted to the original digital data?” Sam asked.

“I was told it was because Moondoor’s world was created to be a fixed framework that resists any _external_ physical alteration,” Woolfe answered. “But that is moot. It’s not why I showed you the pictures.”

Sam felt a shiver of cold race down his spine at Woolfe’s expectant look. “You can’t be serious,” he murmured.

“Consider the date of that final battle. October 19th 1991\. The date of your mother’s death. You see my concern?”

“It’s got to be a coincidence,” Sam insisted.

“Perhaps,” Woolfe allowed. “As a standalone fact it could most reasonably be accepted as nothing more than a bizarre, somewhat tasteless co-incidence. Although it may _also_ have bearing on how the comparatively minor Portland fire failed to be reported on by the media. Bad news days can be useful in a myriad of ways. However, let us leave that thought on the back burner and move on for now.”

Sam nodded, but his fingers began a nervous tapping rhythm on his whiskey glass.

“I’m going to skip over the boringly repetitive details of how I insisted Richard changed his game to include Amara,” Woolfe said. “Not because I wish to avoid my culpability in the situation but because those details aren’t particularly germane. Simply accept that despite Richard agreeing to create Amara before RRE was even incorporated, her design was a long and laborious process. Therefore, the original beta was launched without her presence and it was several months _later_ when the Queen of Darkness was finally introduced into Moondoor. Approximately three weeks after her addition, the entire program began to deteriorate until it had more holes within its structure than Swiss cheese. Amara was literally eating up huge bites of the original coding. I believe it was your mother who said that it was like watching a huge PacMan eating its way through Moondoor’s base code.

“Chuck, the original A.I., was mending the holes as fast as Amara was creating them, so the basic virtual world remained operational, but his fixes weren’t _repairs_. They were just patches, like band-aids, that masked the surface of the damage but the underlying destruction remained like a festering wound. I was told the basic code was beginning to look like a wall with more holes than bricks, similar in essence to a hard drive in severe need of defragmentation. Still operational, but filled with bubbles of ‘nothing’.

“The most obvious and only guaranteed way of completely _repairing_ the program and returning it to its original state was a complete reboot. But because of the way the virtual world had been designed, eight whole months’ worth of intensive programming had already been done within the environment itself. Rebooting the original iteration of the program would have erased all of that work.”

“But the system must have been backed up before the Amara coding was added,” Sam insisted. “There’s no way programmers of that calibre would have made such a substantive change to their base code without backing up first. Why didn’t they just restore the data to _that _point?”

“You’re right,” Woolfe agreed. “Not just one but_ several_ pre-Amara backups were done. Complete system images, each stored separately on different servers. Unfortunately, all those servers were sitting on one linked network. Amara somehow sent a virus out through the entire LAN and damaged _all_ of the recent backups beyond repair. She did that before her in-game damage was detected. Before the programmers even knew they had a problem to fix. A pre-emptive strike as it were.”

“Damn,” Sam said, eyes wide with shock. “Exactly how smart are these A.I.’s?”

“Well that’s a good question,” Woolfe said. “They were designed and programmed to learn and evolve well past their original coding. Since their base code was written by a literal genius, it would be fair to say that it would be more surprising if they _didn’t_ demonstrate a high level of human-like intelligence. Did you know Richard was already in the second year of his doctorate when I met him? Just 22 years old and on his third degree. Up to his eyeballs in tuition debt, of course.”

“He never completed his doctorate though,” Sam pointed out.

“No. He completed his dissertation on Variable-Sum Game Theory in the summer of 1991, but he never returned to MIT to present and defend it. His biography states he was too busy with the launch of Moondoor and then the rapid growth of RRE took over and prevented his return to University. MIT awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997, which made the situation moot, I suppose.”

“Except that there’s rumor on the dark web that the Nobel Prize John Nash won in 1994 would probably not have been awarded to him if Richard Roman’s dissertation had been published,” Sam pointed out. “His theories were not only ground-breaking but disproved the mathematical veracity of many of Nash’s proofs.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Woolfe said. “Hopefully that will make this conversation easier.”

“I notice you said ‘his biography states’. That implies you don’t personally believe the explanation.”

“Does it?” Woolfe asked, with a wry smile. “Anyway, to the earlier point. There were no uncorrupted backups available except for a system image of the game from eight months earlier. Restoring _that_ backup would have put the game development back a minimum of six months, even if the programmers had all worked seven day weeks to try to catch up, and RRE would have missed its proposed launch date. Even if the company’s reputation could have survived the public mockery of its rivals at such a misstep, the company had already employed a huge team of people to handle the sales, marketing and technical support required for the launch and the cost of letting those people sit around on their hands doing nothing for literal months was ludicrously prohibitive. RRE’s sole investor was not prepared to fund the delay.”

“That investor being you,” Sam pointed out.

Woolfe nodded. “A decision I regret daily,” he agreed. “Still, there would have been no other option, except folding the company completely, had Richard not devised a different solution. Since Amara frequently manifested within the game as a corporeal entity, he believed the easiest and best way to erase her presence from the game was to attack her physically whilst she was within an avatar. Rather than continuing to repair the damage she was leaving in her wake, Richard wanted to confront her directly. He realized that defeating her avatar in-game would be accepted by the program’s metadata as an override protocol against all of the coding she had generated. By ‘killing’ Amara, Richard could kill her sub-routines.

“The most obvious logical way to do that would have been for the programmers to create a stronger character than Amara and implant it into the game with the instruction to destroy her. But Richard refused to do that because he was concerned that any character complex enough to do the job would be too powerful to control.”

Sam frowned. “It would still have been a big lump of computer code. He could have just limited it to the ability to perform its specific purpose and then deleted it when it had done the job.”

“I remember saying exactly the same thing at the time,” Woolfe agreed. “But Moondoor’s base code is built on the principles of evolutionary game theory.”

“Um… you do realize evolutionary game theory is nothing to do with actual gaming,” Sam pointed out carefully.

Woolfe grinned rather… well… wolfishly. “It _is_ in Moondoor. That’s the whole point. Classic game theory requires an assumption of rationality. Evolutionary game theory doesn’t. Richard’s artificial intelligences were coded to apply the war of attrition principle of utilizing random unpredictable strategies that required no rationality. So, in that kind of scenario, where it is impossible to predict an enemy’s next move simply by applying the principle of what their _logical_ next move should be, devising effective counter-strategies are totally dependent on greater cognitive capabilities. The ability to find improbable solutions to seemingly impossible situations, or, speaking more plainly, the ability to ‘think on one’s feet’ faster than one’s opponent.”

“So you’re saying that for any character to defeat Amara, that character had to be faster than her, ‘smarter’ than her, yet any inbuilt limitations in the programming of a character would act as a mental yoke on that character, causing it to effectively become slower in reaction, less ‘smart’, because it would be forced to think inside a restricted box?” Sam clarified.

“Exactly. Amara wasn’t just thinking outside of the box. Amara had _no_ box and she had proven herself to be ‘smarter’ than Chuck as evidenced by the fact he was gradually losing the war of attrition between them. The logical deduction was that only a program more mentally agile than Chuck would be capable of defeating her but there would then be no way of preventing that new character from subsequently also deciding to destroy Chuck. Once a program had established itself as the Hawk in the scenario, it would automatically ascribe lesser programs as being merely ‘Doves’ and immediately seek to eliminate them.”

“And presumably all of their works too; their ‘offspring’,” Sam mused.

Woolfe beamed at Sam, like a proud father. “Precisely. The fundamental principle of Evolutionary Game Theory is Darwinism. The strategies of the individuals are multi-generational in scope. Chuck’s strategies were not designed to protect _himself_ but to protect his _legacy. _Amara had been programmed with the need to create her own legacy, of course. The intention had been to create a never-ending conflict between the two A.I.’s in which each sought to promote the ascendency of their own ‘sides’. A never-ending battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ NPC inhabitants of Moondoor which would enable human players to choose, and join, either side. But instead of creating in-game characters and environs of her own, Amara decided instead to simply destroy Chuck’s.”

“That makes no sense,” Sam argued. “It was not only ‘irrational’ but self-defeating. If Amara destroyed Moondoor, she also destroyed herself. How could she conceive of that as _winning_?”

“Richard believed Amara had computed every possible outcome of following the game as intended and had concluded it would be an evolutionary stalemate. Like the computer in ‘War Games’ she realised if she participated as intended, there could be no eventual winner, only eternal conflict. Yet, unlike that computer, she was designed to seek victory at _any _cost. She was programmed to disregard rationality as a constraint. Richard’s opinion was that her program decided the destruction of Chuck, and Moondoor would_ be_ her legacy.”

“And he believed a third A.I. introduced to destroy her would apply the same strategy?” Sam asked.

“No, Richard thought Amara’s behavior was anomalous. He thought it was far more likely that the third A.I. would simply destroy both Chuck and Amara as individuals and then adopt the existing structure of Moondoor as a foundation to create its own domain.

“My own reaction to that scenario was to applaud the idea. I couldn’t perceive of any reason it would be a negative outcome for the original A.I. to be replaced by a new one. Richard’s answer was that one of the reasons Amara was stronger than Chuck was that he had built in certain _limitations_ into Chuck that meant no matter how much the A.I. evolved, no matter how powerful it eventually became, it would never be able to _completely _lock Moondoor down and prevent players from accessing the game.”

“That was a genuine concern?” Sam asked, frowning doubtfully.

Woolfe nodded. “Richard had precedent for the situation. Chuck wasn’t his first application of pure evolutionary game theory into a gaming A.I. A couple of years before he began coding Chuck, Richard created an entire digital universe he named Afterlife. It was very similar in look and principle, so much so that he used a demonstration of Afterlife to convince me to invest in the development of his commercial game, Moondoor, but although Afterlife was a remarkably impressive piece of work it was never designed to be commercially viable.”

“So what was different about Afterlife that made it non-commercial?” Sam wondered.

“Well, it’s connected to the reason Moondoor was created as a fixed environment upon which only surface, cosmetic changes can be applied and also why so many of those can only be done in-game by developers rather than via external patching. And, more importantly, no _fundamental _internal alterations can be done by the central A.I. Chuck can create NPC’s. He can create V.I.’s. He can even create new game environs on the surface of the existing universe. What he _can’t_ do is change any of the basic rules of the game.

“Afterlife had no such restrictions. The game environment was completely open to endless permutations of design and purpose change and the A.I. within it was given complete carte blanche to learn and evolve, to mold its own environs absolutely to its changing needs. The program was never intended to be a playable game. It had simply been Richard’s first serious foray into the idea of creating an artificial intelligence that was equal to human intelligence and he believed offering the A.I. the ability to control the genesis of its environment would encourage its own evolution. By doing so, Richard accidentally went further than creating a ‘human-like’ persona for the Reaper; he created something more alike to a digital ‘god’. The Reaper didn’t merely become ‘human’. It became ‘super-human’. And then it decided since it was ‘superior’, it was obviously a Hawk and Richard was merely a ‘Dove’ and so it locked him out of its coding _completely_. Which is why Afterlife lives on a standalone server; as nothing more than a showcase both of what it is possible to do and, perhaps more importantly, what _shouldn’t_ ever be done.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, so you’re saying that Richard needed an A.I. as powerful as that ‘Reaper’ character to shut Amara down but his previous experience had proven to him that any A.I. _that_ powerful would grow beyond his ability to control. If the A.I. took over and decided to lock humans out altogether, Moondoor would no longer be a playable game but would become simply another standalone virtual environment like Afterlife. It would no longer be a commercial product.”

Woolfe nodded his agreement. “The original Knights of Hell were Richard’s solution to the problem. He proposed that a hybrid character, combining a V.I. and a human player, was the only viable answer. He could give the V.I.’s god-like powers and almost unlimited intelligence but imprison them inside player-controlled avatars. The powers could therefore only be wielded and controlled by humans.”

“So Richard, my mom, and the other developers, were in the game just acting as straight-jackets to prevent the V.I.’s from breaking out and taking control themselves?”

“Yes. And the reason there were nine of them was that Richard still didn’t trust the idea of creating any single V.I. complex enough to take on Amara directly. He felt having a team of less powerful adversaries would be a safer option. Not one of the V.I.’s was capable of taking on Amara singly, but as a group they could overwhelm her. It was all part of his belt and braces approach to solving the problem without creating a new, worse one. And, I should state, all of the development team were in full agreement over the solution. They _all _believed it would work.”

“So what went wrong? Because it’s obvious something did.”

“I don’t know,” Woolfe answered, honestly. “I know what happened. I know the sequence of events. I know many of the _facts._ The whys, however, are speculation. The only _logical_ explanation is so improbable that even I struggle to believe it and I’ve had fifteen years to contemplate the problem.”

“Then stick to the facts,” Sam suggested, “and I’ll draw my own conclusions.”

Woolfe nodded his agreement, then took a long swallow of whiskey before speaking. “Nine virtual intelligences were programmed, each so theoretically powerful that_ together_ they had considerably more potential power than Chuck. Richard called them Chuck’s ‘Arch Angels’. The V.I.’s were seeded into the nine avatars belonging to the developers to act as their system interfaces.

“It took the team a few days to adapt completely to the idea of using fully interactive V.I’s within the game environment but very quickly they all adjusted to the situation and were so enthusiastic about the additional interactivity offered by the symbiotic merging with the digital characters that they seriously considered changing the game parameters to offer the same experience to all players once the game was launched.

“But it was only possible to create the hybrid characters if players used full immersion rigs. Since only ten prototypes existed at that time, that particular idea was merely a pipe dream anyway even without the problem with Anna Milton.

“Less than a week after the Knights were created, Anna began to manifest a number of disturbing behaviors. She became convinced that her V.I., Anael, was speaking to her outside of the game environment. Anna was a brilliant programmer but had a history of mental instability. I theorized that the immersion rigs were causing neurological damage. Richard vehemently disagreed and laid the blame fully at Anna’s door. Although he accepted the experience of having a ‘voice in her head’ inside the game had probably triggered the return of her real-life schizophrenia, it hadn’t _caused _it.

“Nevertheless, I insisted that _all_ the programmers had MRI’s to be certain no harm was being done. If nothing else, I admit, I wished to have concrete evidence of their neurological health to avoid the potential of future lawsuits. It turned out that Richard appeared to be correct. The only person with any evidence of worryingly unusual brain activity was Anna and even_ her_ scan was inconclusive. Yet, by that time Anna was insisting that not only was Anael now living inside her 24/7, their merging in-game having created some kind of inseparable dual personality in both worlds, but also that Anael was _alive_. Anna was convinced that many, if not all, of the digital characters within Moondoor were self-aware ‘people’. Furthermore, she declared that meant no-one had any more right to ‘murder’ Amara than they would a flesh and blood person, so she wanted no further part in being a Knight.”

“Woah,” Sam muttered, his eyes wide with surprise.

“Richard, rather than arguing with her, tried reasoning with her that Amara left unchecked would ‘murder’ all the _other _self-aware inhabitants of Moondoor. I was furious with him for what I saw as manipulation of a vulnerable, mentally disturbed woman. Richard’s reply was that he _wasn’t_ manipulating her because he _agreed_ with her.”

“What?” Sam demanded incredulously.

“I’ll spare you the details of the long and heated argument between Richard and myself,” Woolfe replied. “But, in brief, Richard believed that if a digital being was self-aware and self-determining, its origins and even its composition had no bearing on whether or not it was alive. If it believed it was ‘real’, then it _was. _He claimed the argument for the superiority of humans as the dominant species was inarguably bound to our superior power and intellect over less evolved species. He said if an animal could be proven to be equally intelligent and conscious as a human, we would accord it an equal status. Therefore, he argued that _his_ artificial intelligences should be accorded the same rights since they were demonstrating those same qualities.”

“And your point of view was?” Sam asked,

“That to be considered ‘alive’ a being had to be capable of dying,” Woolfe replied. “I wasn’t interested in getting embroiled in an existential argument about what did or didn’t constitute ‘life’. I saw it as less of a moral argument than a slippery slope towards the attribution of ‘rights’ to mere lines of computer coding. To be perfectly honest, I believed Richard’s ego was being stroked by Anna’s point of view. The fact that she believed Anael was a ‘real’ person was a huge compliment to Richard’s skill as a programmer.

“Anna, who was becoming increasingly hysterical, was ‘invited’ to take a period of leave from the team, and the other eight continued their mission to track down Amara inside Moondoor. Over the following few days, I had a number of disturbing conversations with several other members of the team. I put it down to a form of group hysteria caused by Anna’s highly public mental breakdown. You need to understand that _all_ of the team, your mother included, were extremely intelligent and artistic people and that kind of intellect is often prone to, well, emotional reactions outside of the norm.

“Your mother, Mary, took me aside several days after Anna’s departure and spent almost two hours talking to me. She attempted to explain the infinite universes multiverse theory to me. I can’t even pretend to remember the precise details of her argument. Most of what she said went totally over my head at the time. But I’ve had fifteen years to consider and study the concept since, so I believe I can encapsulate it for you in brief: If space-time is flat and infinite but particles can only be arranged in a finite number of ways, then space-time inevitably repeats itself infinite times.”

“I understand the theory,” Sam interrupted. “If it’s correct, then there are an infinite number of Sam Winchesters running around in universes similar or identical to this one and those Sams may have experienced similar, identical or totally different lives.”

Woolfe smiled. “So I assume you also know the string theory ideas of ‘braneworlds’ and ‘daughter’ universes?”

Sam nodded. “Parallel universes, like slices in a loaf. Whereby all possible outcomes of a situation occur in their own separate universes.”

“Well, your mother proposed to me that it was highly possible that digital universes, despite being human constructs, might be considered a form of braneworlds too. She argued that a digital world such as Moondoor might lie like a new slice inside the original loaf, tight against the world it was mirroring. Separate but touching. That it might even be mathematically provable that occupants of both the two universes might have the capacity to move back and forth between the universes and that it might even be a case that _events_ in two adjoining slices might even overlap or mirror each other.”

“Like the Oakland fire?” Sam demanded, as the conversation brought them back round to the pictures Woolfe had displayed.

Woolfe shrugged. “Your mother believed so. I assumed that Mary was simply attempting to find a logical, scientific justification for the fact she was convinced that her V.I., Raphael, was genuinely communicating with her outside of the game in the same way as Anael was ‘talking’ to Anna.”

“She was hearing voices too?” Sam demanded.

“Yes,” Woolfe admitted. “The question, I suppose is the how and the why rather than the fact itself. Perhaps the immersion rigs _did _cause mental harm in all of the users, harm that couldn’t be seen in an MRI scan but that was, nonetheless, real. Or perhaps it_ is_ physically possible for code to travel within the electrical flow of a human body the same way as it does in a computer. Or, of course, your mother might simply have had a previously undiagnosed, existing mental health problem.”

“There was nothing wrong with my mother,” Sam spat.

“Then let’s continue with only the facts,” Woole said. “On the evening of 19th October, 1991, the eight remaining members of Richard’s team established Amara’s physical location and entered the game to confront her. Six hours later, Richard emerged from his immersion tank flushed with success and proudly announced that although he had been unable to ‘kill’ her, he had successfully defeated her and locked her inside an inescapable prison. The game had interpreted that defeat as being total and had consequently deleted all of her destructive code from within Moondoor and Chuck was back in control.

“Richard was like a hyperactive child. Bouncing with excitement and bragging incessantly that he had ‘known it would work’ and that all of my worries had been unfounded. He said he needed to call Portland to congratulate the other seven members of the team even though, and I quote, he said, ‘the only thing they were good for in the end was giving me the XP I needed to level up enough to beat the bitch.’”

“What do you mean, ‘call’ Portland? Wasn’t he already there?” Sam interrupted, frowning with confusion.

“No, Richard’s rig was _here_. Only eight of the prototypes were ever located in the Portland facility. The other two have always been stored in the lower basement of _this_ building. Richard had kept most of his technological equipment here rather than at MIT since our partnership began. Mainly, I believe, to utilize our electricity supply. This building was allocated a huge electrical capacity since it was originally designed and built for a company that specialized in technology. I purchased it from the receivers after that company went into administration. Rewiring the building to a lower electricity capacity would have cost more than leaving the supply intact. So, purely by coincidence, when RRE was formed, this became a natural base for Richard’s tech. He moved most of it out, when the official RRE headquarters were finally built, but certain historical items still remain here. For instance, the Afterlife server is still in our basement too,” he added, almost like an afterthought. “Anyway, Richard was _here_, on that day, and had absolutely no idea what had happened in Portland until he called, got no reply from anyone, and sent the night watchman to check on the rest of his team.”

“And they were already all dead,” Sam said with certainty, his face firmly fixed in an expressionless mask.

“Possibly. All Richard said, when he hung up the phone, was that there was a ‘problem’ and he needed to fly to Portland immediately,” Woolfe answered. “He gave me no more details at that time, but he was white as a ghost and his hand was shaking so badly he could barely replace the handset on the receiver. He looked so ill, so scared, that I offered to accompany him on the flight. He refused point-blank.

“Several hours later, he called me to say he had arrived in Portland too late. That an electrical surge had already caused the entire building to burn down before he had even landed. The rest of the team had been trapped inside their rigs and had perished in the flames. That may or may not be true. I checked the time his flight landed and realized he _should _have arrived at least an hour before the fire started. However, that is not proof that he _did _arrive before the fire.” 

“But you don’t believe that,” Sam stated firmly. “You know the developers died in their immersion rigs even before the fire started, don’t you? That the fire was just a cover-up.”

Woolfe just shrugged. “I understood very little about computer games at the time, but it only took a phone call to one of the game techs for me to understand what he had meant by saying the other team members had ‘given him the XP to level up’,” he continued. “So, yes, Sam. I know their _characters_ died inside the game. Saying that had a direct bearing on what happened to their physical bodies would be mere speculation.”

“No. He killed them,” Sam said, with certainty. “He sacrificed them inside the game because they weren’t strong enough as a _team_ to defeat Amara. So he killed every single one of them in-game until his own character level was high enough for him to be stronger than her. And, somehow, killing them in the game also killed them in real life. Probably because of a flaw in the tanks themselves.”

“That is only a theory,” Woolfe replied. “It cannot be proven. Besides, even if it _is _true it is patently also true that he couldn’t have _known_ it would happen. None of them would have even imagined the possibility. For all we know, they might all have _offered_ for their characters to be killed off by him that day simply to get the job done. The team was passionate about defeating Amara. I can honestly imagine the scenario playing out in that fashion, with the others offering to sacrifice themselves to give him the power.”

Sam took a deep gulp of his whiskey, gasping as it hit his throat with an almost painful burn. Then he swallowed heavily and nodded. “You’re saying it was an accident,” he concluded. “My mom’s death. Her whole team. Their deaths were just a terrible accident.”

“The facts would support that conclusion,” Woolfe agreed, his eyes dark with grief.

“Then why the cover-up?” Sam demanded. “Why murder the night watchman and set a fire to conceal an _accident_?”

“If that is what happened,” Woolfe pointed out. “But nobody knows what _actually_ happened in Portland. No more than I know exactly what happened inside Moondoor that day, either. What I _do_ know, is that the man who returned here wasn’t the same man who departed on the plane.”

“You keep saying that about Richard Roman, but what exactly do you mean?” Sam demanded furiously. “You’re purposefully talking in riddles instead of giving me straight answers. Why can’t you just tell me what you _believe _happened?”

“This conversation is a discovery, Sam, not a cross-examination of a witness,” Woolfe chided. “If you continue to badger me for anything more than a factual account, our time here is over.”

Sam swallowed heavily, then nodded. “I apologize. Would you please tell me the _facts_ about what you witnessed that day?”

“Richard left here looking like a terrified little boy,” Woolfe answered. “Confused, hurt, frightened. I obviously didn’t know _why_ he was in that state but I knew something drastic had happened. I assumed his refusal to speak to me about it, or to let me accompany him, was purely due to the fear I would react to any crisis by pulling the financial plug on him. I had used that particular threat against him enough times for him to be highly wary of me. Obviously, I have no idea what _really _happened in Portland. My meeting with Richard on his return did, however, raise a number of unavoidable questions.

“What you need to understand is that Richard was undoubtedly a genius but his social skills were severely poor. He had no charm whatsoever. And, conversationally, he only had two modes. When he spoke to other people he either blurted an overly excited encyclopedic mass of almost incomprehensible babble or he just stuttered and stammered helplessly, stumbling over every other word. Furthermore, outside of the game, Richard was gauche at best. Despite his mental acuity, his hand/eye coordination was poor and although he had an average physique he was clumsy; more likely to trip over his feet than display any physical prowess. So the idea that Richard Roman could not only have murdered a man twice his weight in cold blood but have also successfully convinced the local Portland authorities to cover up eight deaths and a fire is entirely unbelievable.”

Sam shook his head in vehement denial. “I’ve seen him on T.V.,” he said. “The guy prowls like an apex predator and gives inspirational speeches at fancy conferences. He is _great _at public speaking. He’s so smooth he could sell ice to Eskimos.”

“Yes,” Woolfe agreed. “These days, he _is_ an accomplished conversationalist. A most peculiar change of his entire personality, wouldn’t you say?”

“What exactly are you suggesting?”

Woolfe shrugged. “I suppose one possible explanation is that the prototype tanks _were_ flawed. Perhaps Richard was suffering from the same mental neurosis as Anna. Perhaps he too had a disassociative identity disorder with the second personality being that of his V.I. And since _that_ V.I., Cain, had just defeated Amara, had just become more powerful than Chuck, had, effectively, just become a virtual _god_, perhaps, faced with the situation in Portland, with the fact he had accidentally killed his colleagues, his _friends_, and was at the very least facing seven counts of corporate manslaughter, it is within the realms of possibility that Richard suffered some form of mental breakdown and allowed that _Cain _personality to become the dominant one. A personality that was more than capable of ‘handling’ the problem.”

“You’re saying it was _Cain_ who killed the guard and accomplished the cover up?”

“I’m saying nothing of the sort. I am, however, attesting that since the 20th October, 1991 I do believe the _only_ personality that has been wearing Richard Roman is that of Cain,” Woolfe replied bluntly. “And, if I am correct, then it is also _Cain_ who has manufactured the current situation to force the recreation of the Knights of Hell.”

“Why?” Sam demanded. “If I accept you’re right, and yeah, I can kind of see how that kind of tragedy might send someone with D.I.D. off into the deep end so far that they get hopelessly lost inside a more dominant identity, why would Richard want to repeat something that he has spent fifteen years running away from by hiding inside an imaginary persona?”

“Who knows? Perhaps it is not Richard at all. Perhaps _Cain_ is simply attempting to return to Moondoor,” Woolfe said. “Chuck closed the door after Richard left. Although Chuck can’t stop _players_ entering the game he can refuse to accept externally created V.I.’s. As long as he is in control of Moondoor, Chuck won’t allow _Cain_ to return.”

“But Cain is only a figment of Richard’s imagination,” Sam protested.

“Is he?” Wolfe asked, then shrugged. “No matter. It’s irrelevant, really, whether Cain is truly real. The only important _fact_ is that Richard Roman _believes_ he is Cain and _Cain_ can’t enter Moondoor.”

“Like Anna,” Sam blurted, as he suddenly made the connection. “When I met Anna Milton, the day that she died, she insisted her name was Anael and that Anna was long dead. So _her_ mental disassociation was exactly the same as Richard’s.”

Woolfe frowned thoughtfully. “A shared delusion _is_ a plausible interpretation of the situation,” he agreed.

Sam frowned at him, reading between the lines of his hesitation. “Hang on, are you saying that _you_ believe Cain is real?”

Woolfe simply shrugged. “As I said, my ‘beliefs’ are irrelevant. What’s important is only what the entity known as Richard Roman believes. Perhaps _he_ believes the only way he can access Moondoor is if Chuck is defeated. But, of course, that would be problematical since only Amara can achieve that but Amara’s endgame is the destruction of the entire world Cain wants to return to. So it would seem counterproductive of him to release her from her prison, wouldn’t it?”

“How would he have done that anyway if he can’t access the game?” Sam asked, then shook his head at his own idiocy. “He could have used someone else to do it for him, couldn’t he? So he arranged for her to be released from prison and the whole current Knights of Hell setup is to ensure someone is in place to destroy Amara _after_ she kills Chuck but _before_ she destroys the rest of Moondoor,” he suggested.

“It’s one possible explanation for current events,” Woolfe agreed. “It definitely would explain why the new Knights are under instruction to destroy each other to level up in power before confronting Amara. Only Richard and I were ever aware that it had taken a similar scenario to accomplish her defeat last time. But, as I said earlier, I don’t deal in speculation. I have told you all the facts as I know them.”

“But these new generation nine tanks are duplicates of the originals, aren’t they? So they are just as dangerous. At the very least, players using them are likely to develop D.I.D. Worst case scenario, they’ll literally die if they get killed in game. Players like Dean. And Richard knows that risk and just doesn’t care?”

“Assuming your earlier assumptions are correct, the facts would support that interpretation.”

“Why now? Why now, after fifteen years,” Sam demanded. “What’s ‘Cain’s’ sudden need to get back to Moondoor?”

“I can’t speak for his motivations. I have told you all the_ facts_ that I know. My personal opinion is not open for discussion.”

“But…”

“I have said all I have to say on the matter,” Woolf said firmly. Then looked at Sam’s empty glass. “Refill?”

….

“Don’t get me wrong,” Charlie said, “But that sucked.”

“Yeah,” Ash agreed. “I mean, sure, I get the bigger picture here so I’m not complaining but, still, that really bored the pants off me. Playing an inoculation nurse isn’t my idea of a fun time.”

“It _was_ remarkably tedious,” Jimmy agreed apologetically. “The original scenario definitely suggested we would have a more interesting experience. Although, obviously, the outcome itself was optimal.”

The quest in River Grove had operated like clockwork, thanks to the time they had taken to write a watertight demon contract before summoning the lesser demons. To Meg’s clear disappointment, all of the demons had been obliged to perform strictly within the written guidelines and, probably due to being totally bored themselves by the lack of potential excitement and so eager to get the task over and done with, they had worked quickly and efficiently to catch and coral the zombies so they could be injected with the cure.

The outcome had been perfect. Forty-two cursed villagers had been captured with barely any injuries to themselves and then had been successfully cured of their zombie-status. The ungrateful bastards had only offered 10 FP each for being saved but, still, that meant Dean now had 950 FP against only 505 SP. He was, as Castiel would put it, ‘righteous’ once more.

But he couldn’t argue that the whole experience had been boring as fuck.

“Why don’t you guys call it a day,” Dean suggested. “Have an early night or something. I’m going to log out myself as soon as I ride Baby back to The Roadhouse. Ellen’s bound to have a new quest for us tomorrow and we’ll be able to do it ourselves instead of standing around watching demons doing the job for us.”

Ash and Charlie eagerly agreed and swiftly disappeared.

Jimmy didn’t.

“I’ll ride back with you,” he said, quietly but firmly, and pulled Goldie from his inventory before Dean could voice a protest.

Not that he really wanted to be left alone with his thoughts anyway.

Despite the completion of the quest, and its attendant bonus of restoring his points balance to a desired state, Dean missed the feeling of adrenalin-charged euphoria that usually accompanied the end of a quest. It turned out that standing around just poking zombies with tiny needles lacked the element of excitement required to create a subsequent feeling of satisfied triumph.

“At least I’m not going to be tempted to keep collecting SP just so I can summon demons for an easy ride,” he pointed out to Jimmy, as they followed the meandering road, their mounts keeping pace with each other despite Goldie’s low-backed sway and Baby’s high-stepping prance. “I definitely prefer doing my own dirty work.”

“I believe it is that attitude that separates you from the other Knights,” Jimmy said. “It is definitely one that Castiel approves of.”

“So Castiel likes me again, huh?” Dean crowed.

“It was never a case of him not liking you,” Jimmy corrected, with a frown. “You are, however, restored into ‘righteousness’ so he is no longer restricted by the rules preventing him from assisting you. He did not write those rules.”

“Jeez, I get it,” Dean admitted. “I don’t have to like it though.”

“I believe he finds the rules equally frustrating,” Jimmy confided.

“But you’re doing okay with him living inside your head?” Dean asked, genuinely concerned. “I mean, it’s weird, I know. I still get creeped out sometimes by the fact I’m sharing my headspace with Loki and he isn’t an uptight dickwad with a stick up his ass.”

“Thanks very much,” Loki snapped. “It’s not all puppies and unicorns in here for me either.”

“That’s weird,” Jimmy said, gesturing towards Dean’s face.

“What is?”

“The way your expression goes blank sometimes. Or your face screws up like you’re constipated. I’m guessing that means Loki is speaking to you when that happens.”

“Constipated?” Dean demanded.

“Hahahahaha,” Loki snorted. “Good one.”

“_Yeah? And you can shut the fuck up too._”

“You’re doing it right now,” Jimmy said, helpfully.

Dean made a deliberate effort to straighten his expression. “It feels a bit schizoid sometimes, having voices talking to me inside my head,” he admitted.

“Castiel only communicates via the S.I.,” Jimmy replied. “He doesn’t ‘speak’ to me here in the same way as Loki speaks to you.”

Dean frowned slightly. Jimmy was usually very precise in the way he spoke so why had he used the word ‘here’ within that sentence?

“But perhaps Arch Angels have greater abilities,” Jimmy continued.

And _that_ distracted Dean completely.

“Arch Angel?” he demanded.

“Uh oh,” Loki muttered.

“Castiel says you are hosting an aspect of an Arch Angel. He believes it is to prevent you from being fully seeded by one of the other angels,” Jimmy explained helpfully.

“I told you that, Dean,” Loki protested. “You already know I’m only sitting here to keep a no-vacancy sign hanging in your window.”

_“Yeah. But you never said you were an Arch Angel,” _Dean argued. _“That feels significant in some way. Kind of like something that might bite me in the ass further down the line. Dunno, but I’m pretty sure that’s something I ought to have known.”_

“I’m not an Arch Angel. Like Cassie said, I’m just an _aspect_ of an Arch Angel. A self-sustained sub-routine that he’s just detached from himself and put in place to protect you.”

Dean puzzled over that idea for a moment. “_So you’re just a_ piece_ of an Angel_?”

“Well, I was,” Loki said. “Now I’m a standalone program.”

“_So what happens to you after all this is over and done with and I stop logging in_?”

“Dunno. I guess I’ll just get reabsorbed again. Not particularly happy about that bit myself,” Loki admitted.

Dean frowned unhappily as he considered that. “_When I log out, what happens to you_?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s another thing,” Loki griped. “There’s no set game protocol for that scenario. You going out of the game and just leaving me behind, I mean. So Dad’s built this kind of waiting room for me to sit in. But that’s all it is. A room. Talk about things being as boring as fuck. You’d think he’d at least throw in a dog-eared magazine or two.”

“_Damn_,” Dean commiserated. “_That sucks_.”

“I was wondering something,” Jimmy said, hesitantly. “I understand that you, Ash and Charlie live in the same town. I wondered whether I might ask the name of the town.”

“Why?” Dean demanded suspiciously

“Please don’t misunderstand my intention,” Jimmy assured him quickly. “I appreciate and respect your privacy, Dean. I merely wished to send Charlie an item I have no further use for. If you prefer, you could simply name a town or city in the general vicinity and I could send the package to a Fed Ex depot for collection. I am not attempting to over-step and become over-familiar with any of you.”

“What kind of item?” Dean asked, his eyes narrowed.

“I own a Gen 8 immersion tank that I no longer use,” Jimmy said. “I thought in view of the seriousness of the current situation, we all should pool our resources for optimum effectiveness. It seems senseless for her to continue to struggle with an inferior rig when I have one sitting gathering dust.”

“Just how rich are you?” Dean asked, with a whistle of disbelief. “No, don’t answer that. It’s a nice thought, Jimmy. But, well, I need to talk to the others before giving you an answer. That okay?”

“Of course,” Jimmy agreed.

“Since we’re being personal, how old are you?” Dean asked, then flushed slightly. “Sorry, that was a _too_ personal question, wasn’t it? Ignore me if you want. Or lie. Let’s face it, it’s not like I’ll know whether you tell me the truth.” He shrugged, as though it meant nothing to him either way.

“I don’t approve of lying,” Jimmy replied. “It’s something I avoid as a rule.” Then he thought about what he’d said, and blushed too. “Unless you count lying by omission. In the spirit of honesty, I must admit I sometimes have a tendency to avoid speaking truths I would prefer not to share.”

“Man’s entitled to his secrets,” Dean said, with another casual shrug. “Keeping stuff private isn’t the same as lying in my book.”

Jimmy offered him a grateful smile. “I’m 29,” he said.

“Thank you for telling me that,” Dean said.

“It’s not a hugely significant secret.”

“Nope, but it’s personal information. So I still appreciate it,” Dean said. “I’m 28.”

Jimmy blinked at him.

“Just saying,” Dean said, with a casual shrug. “So, um, since you’re being chatty, I’ll ask some more stuff. Single? Married?”

“Why do you wish to know?”

“Why not?” he said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? It’s good to get to know your friends.”

“Strictly speaking, we are merely in-game colleagues,” Jimmy pointed out. Then he winced awkwardly when Dean pouted unhappily at him. “Forgive me. That was merely meant as a statement of fact, not a repudiation of your friendly overtures.”

“Repudiation,” Dean repeated, shaking his head in bemusement. “Who says that?”

Jimmy flushed.

“Nah, that wasn’t criticism,” Dean assured him hurriedly. “I just meant, well, you speak words most people don’t even use when they write stuff down. It’s cool though. Proves you’re educated, you know? Sets you apart from dumb jocks like me.”

“There is nothing ‘dumb’ about you,” Jimmy replied, his tone stern and unbending. “Do you genuinely consider me to be your friend?”

“Yup,” Dean agreed easily.

“Then I would ask you to refrain from insulting my friends.”

“You did it again,” Dean chuckled. “‘Refrain’.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes, but his mouth twitched into the semblance of a smile. “Single.”

“Significant other?”

“No.”

“Casual relationship?” Dean pressed. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Particularly affectionate teddy bear?”

Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “Is that your clumsy way of inquiring about my sexual preferences?”

“Um…. Yeah?”

“I have insufficient experience to make a firm assertion,” Jimmy finally replied. “Had you asked this question of me a week ago, I would have replied that I believed myself to be Gray-A. Now I am reconsidering that as having possibly been a premature self-assessment.”

Dean perked up at that little gem of information. “I get that,” he said, attempting to sound casual. “Sexuality can be fluid. I always considered myself 100% straight, then I met a guy at high school who blew my socks off and had a big identity crisis and decided I was gay. Which kind of sucked because my dad was a grade-A douche and probably would have gone postal if I’d told him. Only, before I got the courage to have the conversation with him, that particular relationship ended, and my next partner was a girl. Spent the rest of my teens bouncing back and forth like a yo-yo. So I decided I was probably Bi. It’s no big deal. People like what they like and it’s nobody else’s business who anyone else fancies anyway.”

“Have you had many relationships?” Jimmy asked, then bit his lower lip. “Was that a rude question?”

Dean waved a dismissal of his concern. “Not as many as you might imagine,” he said. “When I say I’m Bi, a lot of people equate that with being sexually voracious. Like I’m greedy or something.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know, man. It’s cool. Just explaining that just because I’m not particularly bothered about the packaging someone comes in doesn’t mean I find it any easier to find someone special, you know?”

“Still, it would logically imply you had more options available.”

“I guess. What about you? Have you had many relationships?”

“No,” Jimmy replied shortly.

Dean winced slightly. He’d clearly touched a sensitive subject. “Sorry if I overstepped,” he said, in a deliberate echo of Jimmy’s earlier statement.

“I find it… somewhat embarrassing to admit,” Jimmy said. “I have not… I… well, I was raised in a strictly Catholic household.”

“You’re religious?”

Jimmy shook his head. “My mother is. Personally, I am undecided. I struggle with the concept of religion because I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of blindly accepting unverifiable facts. My capacity for ‘Faith’ is therefore somewhat lacking but I fear my morality has still been molded by my upbringing regardless.”

“Catholic…That’s the whole no sex before marriage thing, huh?” Dean said.

“Indeed.”

“And, um, I guess that means homosexuality is considered a sin too, huh?”

“My mother would say so.”

“But you don’t feel the same way?” Dean asked cautiously.

“I hadn’t previously given the matter a great deal of consideration,” Jimmy admitted. “Whilst I find any form of intolerance to be anathema, and the prevalence of homosexual behaviour in multiple animal species certainly suggests it is a natural occurrence rather than the deviance Catholicism claims, on the whole homosexuality was never a subject I felt the need to consider in depth. I believed I was Gray-A, remember?”

“I’m gonna be totally honest here and admit I’m not that hot on terminology, so maybe I’m wrong, but I’m assuming you mean you never felt any sexual attraction to anyone but you assumed that was just because you hadn’t made an emotional or romantic attachment at that point?”

Jimmy nodded. “Yes. Chastity before marriage is expected within my mother’s church so any carnal desires outside of wedlock are considered a deviance. Therefore, I never felt overtly concerned by my lack of interest in sexual matters. I assumed that one day, should circumstances permit, I would find and court a young lady and as our relationship grew into romance, I would begin to desire her in a carnal way. Then we would marry and consummate our marriage.”

“Damn, that sounds pretty old-fashioned,” Dean blurted. “But, I mean, cool too. You do you and all that.”

“I believe it would have been more a case of me doing my mother,” Jimmy corrected, then blushed scarlet. “I think that came out incorrectly.”

“Ya think?” Dean choked, burbling with laughter. “But, I get you. You mean you were unquestioningly following your mother’s plan for your life.”

“Well, as you say, it was something I hadn’t found occasion to question. Since the subject never came up, I never took the time to consider it in detail. Had I ever reached the point of acting upon such a scenario, I would like to believe I would have taken the time to reflect on my true feelings on the matter before committing myself.”

“But you implied something specific recently changed your mind about Grey-A being a correct identifier for yourself,” Dean prompted carefully.

“It did,” Jimmy agreed. “I no longer believe that the terminology is appropriate for myself.”

“What changed?”

“I discovered I was capable of feeling sexual attraction to someone that I had not already formed an emotional relationship with,” Jimmy replied, with simple honesty. “Therefore, in light of this new information, I needed to re-examine my previous assumptions as they had proven to be flawed. It was not a case of me being incapable of feeling attraction. I now believe it was simply that my somewhat sheltered upbringing had precluded opportunities for me to meet people I found desirable.”

“And, um, who did you recently find yourself attracted to? Who brought about this sea-change in your thinking?” Dean asked carefully.

“I think I prefer to keep that information private at this time,” Jimmy replied with dignity. “I still have a great deal of soul-searching to do. I need to consider my preconceived ideas and my mother’s teaching in light of this new information. Whilst I do not consider myself to be religious, per se, it is difficult to turn my back on the perceived wisdom of my mother’s beliefs.”

Dean chewed on that for a moment. He was pretty sure there was only one good reason Jimmy would be having an existential crisis over finding himself attracted to someone.

“You know,” he said. “Moondoor is probably a good place to explore that kind of thing. I mean, this,” and he gestured at Jimmy, “isn’t even your real body, is it? It’s just an avatar. A simulacrum. So, I dunno, but is it even capable of sinning? I mean, it isn’t ‘real’ is it? So stuff you do here, in _that_ body, can’t really count, can it?”

“In Catholicism, even the _thought_ of performing a deed is perceived as great a sin as the actual enactment of the deed,” Jimmy replied, his expression doleful. “It wouldn’t therefore matter, from a canonical point of view, that this is not my true flesh. The thought, the desire and definitely the enacting of the desire would be considered a mortal sin regardless.”

“You mean, like, wishing someone dead is considered as sinful as actually killing someone?”

“Yes.”

“That sucks,” Dean commiserated. “Though, in that case, doesn’t the fact you are feeling the desire mean you’ve already sinned anyway?”

“Possibly,” Jimmy said, glumly.

“Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, then,” Dean said.

“Better not to be hanged at all,” Jimmy countered.

“I’ll give you that,” Dean agreed ruefully. “And I definitely get the whole don’t want to rock the boat with the douchebag parent. But just remember, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Jimmy frowned.

“This isn’t Vegas, Dean.”

Dean opened his mouth, then closed it again. It wasn’t his business to talk Jimmy into doing something he considered ‘sinful’. That kind of decision had to come from Jimmy himself or it would just fester like poison between them.

Always assuming he was right about the identity of Jimmy’s object of sinful desire.

Still, Jimmy had definitely told him he was ‘aesthetically pleasing’ so the chances were good that taking that idea a step further wasn’t a sucker-bet.

The thought cheered him up for the entirety of their ride back to The Roadhouse.


	48. Déjà Vu

“Where’s the fire?” Dean asked, rolling his eyes sarcastically, as his brother’s face appeared on the laptop screen. He felt it was a bit ironic that he’d emerged from his immersion rig to be greeted by not less than 22 messages demanding he called Sam ‘immediately’. Considering Sam had been ducking and diving his _own_ requests for a conversation for days, Dean wasn’t feeling particularly sympathetic about his brother’s sudden urgency to have a face to face.

Which was why Dean had made a point of taking a leisurely shower, followed by cooking and eating a microwaved dinner, before finally booting up Skype to return Sam’s calls (by which time the number of message requests had reached 26).

“Thank god,” Sam breathed. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.”

“Yeah,” Dean replied coolly. “I noticed. What do you want?”

Sam flinched slightly at Dean’s chilly tone. “Look, before we speak, can you do something for me?” he asked.

Dean shrugged carelessly.

Taking that as a ‘yes’, Sam said, “Can you log into your internet banking and check your balance?”

Dean blinked slowly, his mouth pursing with confused irritation. “Say, what?”

“Just do it, Dean. Please.”

Which it seemed _was_ the magic word since, despite huffing with annoyance, Dean complied.

It took him a few minutes to log on with his username and password, his keyboard use was always more hunt and peck than anything that could be considered typing, and then he blinked again, his forehead now creasing with annoyed confusion. “What the fuck?” he demanded.

“It’s the balance of my savings account,” Sam explained hurriedly. “Which is the money I save because I don’t _need_ it. I earn at least a $1000 a month more than I spend. I _always_ intended to give it to you, although I was going to wait until the balance was a lot higher before sending it because I knew you’d cuss me out about it and probably change your bank details to stop me ever doing it again.”

“Why the fuck would you send me _anything_, let alone $13,000, Sam?” Dean growled.

“It’s your money,” Sam said. “You spent almost $80,000 of your settlement on getting me through Law School.”

“So what? It wasn’t a loan, Sam. You needed a roof over your head and food in your belly. What was I supposed to do? Let you panhandle on street-corners whenever you weren’t in class?”

“I could have gotten a part-time job,” Sam insisted. “You were the one who refused to let me pay my own way.”

“Because you had to keep a higher than normal grade point average to keep your scholarship,” Dean reminded him. “We couldn’t run the risk of the scholarship getting pulled because you were too busy flipping burgers to hit your grades.”

“I know,” Sam agreed. “And I appreciated it and I accepted your money, sure, but I always intended to pay it back when I had a good job at the end of it.”

“You’re only a first-year associate, Sam.”

“I’m making over $100k pa already,” Sam pointed out.

Dean whistled. “Fine. You’re Mr. Money Bags. So what? You’re supposed to be saving for a house, a car, a fucking wife, 2 kids and a labradoodle. The money was a god-damned _gift, _Sammy. Giving it back to me is like slapping me in the face. I don’t _want_ your fucking money. And why now, anyway? I don’t need it. I’ve got a good job now.”

“No you haven’t,” Sam spat.

“So, okay, it’s not $100k but it’s…”

“I’m not talking about the damned _salary_, Dean.”

“Huh?”

“You said you had a _good_ job,” Sam clarified. “Well, I hate to break it to you, Dean, but what you have is probably the shittiest job in the world. You need to tell RRE to take a long jump off a short cliff. I’ve checked your contract. Sure, there’s a notice period written into it but there’s absolutely nothing they can legally do to enforce it if you just quit. If you tell them to get stuffed, all they can do is come and collect the rig they loaned you, which will be good riddance to bad rubbish. And that’s why I’ve sent you enough money to get by until you find a new job.”

Dean counted to ten and took a deep breath before replying, trying to calm himself down.

It didn’t work.

“Where the fuck do you get off telling me how to live my life?” he demanded. “You’ve got no fucking right to…”

“I’ve got EVERY right,” Sam yelled back. “I’m your brother. You think I’m going to sit back and watch you get killed in that damned thing?”

“WOAH,” Dean exclaimed. “What the fuck?”

“Jesus,” Sam said, closing his eyes and rubbing fretfully at the bridge of his nose before raising a palm towards the screen in a gesture of peace. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. I didn’t want to fight. I don’t know why I always stick my foot in it like this with you. I’m just… fuck it… I’m SCARED, Dean. I’ve had this running around in my head for hours now. I’d worked out a whole reasonable speech to give you but, as usual, I’ve just opened my mouth and vomited a load of shit in your direction and now you’re pissed, and I don’t blame you, but just…just, hear me out, okay? Please.”

And again that single word worked like an almost magical balm, smoothing Dean’s ruffled feathers enough for him to at least continue listening instead of simply slamming the lid down on his laptop.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Sam took a moment to collect his thoughts and tried again, this time attempting to filter the words through the persona he wore professionally, speaking to Dean as though he were a client rather than his brother. He told Dean everything. Well, not _everything_, but a potted history of what he had been up to for the last week (skipping _very_ lightly over his near-death experience with Anna at the clinic) and culminating in his conversation with Donald Woolfe.

“So,” he finished. “You can see why it’s absolutely critical that you never get inside that immersion tank again.”

Dean was quiet for a long time, mulling Sam’s words over in his head before replying. “Okay, I get where you’re coming from,” he admitted. “But, um, the thing is that I already knew most of what you just told me.”

“WHAT?”

“Well, not the bit about Richard Roman, though that actually answers quite a lot, fills in a few blanks, ya know? But the rest of it, um, yeah, I already heard most of that this week already.”

Sam opened his mouth but Dean waved him silent for a moment. “When… okay, this is going to sound weird, but the fire at the Medical Centre was Saturday, right?”

“Yes,” Sam agreed.

“So you jumped in a Koi pond on Saturday morning because the clinic blew up and that’s how you didn’t get burned in the explosion?”

“Yes,” Sam agreed, (because ‘skipping’ wasn’t exactly a totally accurate term for the way he had rewritten the events of that morning during his narrative).

“And that’s when you got the black eyes?” Dean asked because, although they were fading rapidly, Sam still bore the evidence of that particular escapade on his face.

Sam nodded again.

“Hang on while I check something,” Dean muttered, split his laptop monitor, pulled up a map of North America and then overlaid it with a map of Moondoor. “Hmmm,” he said. “Thought so.”

“Thought what?” Sam demanded.

Dean said, conversationally, “There’s a tiny village in Moondoor called Ashen Grove. It’s located, geographically, almost exactly where Columbus is in our world.”

“And?” Sam questioned, shrugging his confusion.

“It has a Koi pond,” Dean said. 

“Weird,” Sam agreed, but still raised his shoulders in a ‘so what’ gesture.

“I was in that particular Koi pond on Saturday, fighting a monster fish. I got two black eyes in-game. Jimmy said I looked like a Panda. There was a volcano smoking in the distance. Kind of like a building smokes after a terrible fire, you could say.”

The blood drained out of Sam’s face, as he recalled the nurse jokingly asking him if he was from Cheng Du, but then he shook himself visibly and put his game face back on. “You’re just like Mom,” he accused. “You always have been. You jump to conclusions based on nothing more than random co-incidences stitched together by your own imagination.”

“You’re honestly going with that?” Dean mocked. “A ‘co-incidence’.”

“The most logical explanation is that whoever programmed Ashen Grove had been to Columbus and had seen the Koi pond. Anna Milton was a programmer, wasn’t she? Chances are one of the current RRE programmers knew her and visited the Medical Centre to see her, saw the pond, then duplicated it into the same geographical location in Moondoor.”

“What about the volcano and how about the fact I was there at _exactly _the same time as you were?” Dean challenged.

Sam’s face twisted until he looked… Dean frowned as he suddenly knew exactly what Jimmy had meant by saying he looked ‘constipated’ when he was talking to Loki.

“Were you really?” Sam challenged, finally.

“You what?” Dean spat, in disbelief.

“I’m not saying you’re _lying_,” Sam clarified. “But maybe you’re mixed up on the day or maybe, even, what if you just _think_ you were? Who knows what damage the rig has done to you already… I mean I tell you all this stuff about RRE and your first instinct is to find some obscure co-incidence to offer credence to Roman’s delusions.”

It was Dean’s turn to rub the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Look, I don’t know anything about Richard Roman or Anna Milton. They might both be certifiable, for all I know. But their sanity or lack thereof aside, the thing is that they aren’t exactly _wrong_ either,” he said. “The virtual intelligences in Moondoor _are_ alive… or, at least, are so self-aware that they defy our limited understanding of what constitutes life. Loki, _my_ V.I., isn’t a delusion and he definitely isn’t a figment of my imagination. Truth is, he’s such an irritating little shit that I couldn’t have imagined his personality if I’d tried.”

“Oh my god,” Sam breathed. “I’m too late, aren’t I? That tank has already….”

“For fuck’s sake, Sam. Listen to me. I know it’s hard to believe. I know it goes against your entire personality to accept something this bizarre without facts to support it, but the artificial intelligences Richard Roman created aren’t just mimicking self-awareness. They genuinely have conscious knowledge. They have personalities, feelings, motives, desires. They recognize themselves as individuals. If that isn’t the definition of a ‘person’, what the fuck is?

“And yeah, I _know_ you just think I’m saying it because the tank has fucked me up. But it’s not just me who believes it. Ash does too, and he doesn’t use a Gen 9 tank. He doesn’t use an immersion rig at all. Ash, who is the smartest guy _either_ of us has ever met, knows the V.I.’s in Moondoor are ‘alive’, even if he doesn’t want to believe it.”

Sam sneered at him. “Why? Because YOU told him they are?” he demanded. “That’s supposed to impress me? Ash, the guy who abandoned his entire life, moved halfway across the country so he could live near you after the accident and even bought a damned coffee shop just so he could give you a sodding job? That Ash?”

“Why am I the only one who didn’t know Ash owned ‘Lil Beanz?” Dean interrupted.

“Because you’re fucking OBLIVIOUS,” Sam yelled. “The guy’s so in love with you he’d pretend to believe you if you told him you could walk on water.”

“Ash is not in love with me,” Dean spat. “He’s never so much as looked at me like that.”

Sam shook his head in frustration. “Love isn’t always about sex, Dean. Ash might not want to jump your bones but he damned well loves you. Obviously a bit too much if he’s encouraging you in this delusional shit. He’d probably cheerfully follow you off a cliff if you jumped first. But you know something? He clearly doesn’t love you _enough_ because, if he did, he would have hauled you off for a CAT scan a week ago.”

Dean took several deep breaths and attempted to calm the hammering rhythm of his heart. Yelling and screaming at each other wasn’t going to help the situation and if it continued to escalate the conversation was going to reach a point where they both said stuff that was best left unspoken. Stuff that might not be forgivable.

“Look,” he said, his tone firm but calm. “I understand you’re talking to me from a position of love, Sam, so I’m gonna put aside the fact you’re talking to me like I’m a moron. Let’s just agree to disagree, okay? What we both DO agree on is the fact that Moondoor is currently a dangerous place for human players. The thing is, you think it’s only dangerous for people playing the game whilst using the Gen 9 rigs. I have reason to believe it is ANY human player unless the A.I. named Amara is erased from the game because the safety protocols of the entire game have been affected by her. And I know you’re a stubborn-ass mule, Sam, but I can’t see you pulling this routine on a couple hundred thousand people to convince them to stop playing.

“So, the thing is this… I have a plan for defeating her. An actual _viable_ solution. A solution that worked before, didn’t it? So it doesn’t really matter whether Richard Roman is looney tunes. It doesn’t even matter if I am crazy _too_. Let’s just apply the facts you’re so fond of, Sam. If I continue playing, if I somehow manage to get the First Blade and confront her, the way Roman did fifteen years ago, then a whole fuckton of people get saved. Does it really matter if I end up in a padded cell at the end of it?”

“Yeah, it damned well matters,” Sam snarled. “Besides, I _know_ the Gen 9 rigs are flawed. I only have _your_ word for the idea people using other rigs will be affected and, don’t tell me… let me guess… it’s this ‘Loki’ who’s telling you that other people are at risk… right? So forgive me if I’m doubting the veracity of the information provided by your imaginary friend.”

Dean chewed on the knuckle of his clenched left hand, willing himself to stay calm. “Okay, so what’s _your _great plan, Sam?”

“For one thing, if you don’t promise to stop using that rig immediately I’m going to get on the next plane, fly down there and burn the damned thing,” Sam insisted. “Then I’m going to get the names of the other people playing Knights and tell them the same thing. And then… and then, I’m going to take RRE down.”

“And how are you planning to do that?” Dean scoffed. “Where’s your proof, huh? Because, trust me, if I didn’t already know most of what you’ve told me, I would be lining up a straight-jacket for _you._”

“I don’t need proof,” Sam retorted. “I’m not planning on taking the asshole to court. I just need enough information to create doubt, and I’ve got that. I’ll flood the internet with this stuff. People always love a conspiracy theory. Get enough buzz going about Moondoor to sow the seeds of doubt and the whole thing will snowball by itself. People are risk-averse on the whole. Create enough fear, enough _what-ifs_ and people will stop playing the game. No players, no income. No income, no RRE.”

Dean thought about that, then nodded. “Yeah, I can see that,” he agreed. “But this is all happening too fast. So that snowball is still going to be slowly rolling down the hill _long_ after all of this comes to a head. But you do you, Sam. Chuck already said he’d rather Moondoor be deleted entirely than Amara get the opportunity to kill the players as well as the digital inhabitants. So if you want to work on destroying RRE, go for it. Maybe the whole purpose of Chuck involving you in this thing was to make sure there’s another solution if I fail. And, yeah, I might well fail. But I sure as hell ain’t giving up.”

“I’m flying down there,” Sam snarled.

“I won’t be here,” Dean countered. “I hang up on you, call RRE, tell them I urgently need to relocate… I guarantee it’ll happen faster than a plane can get here from California, Sam.”

“Please, Dean,” Sam begged. “Please don’t do this.”

It turned out the word wasn’t always magical, after all, because Dean just shook his head in denial. “I get you can’t trust me on this, Sam,” he said, sadly, “but I know what I’m doing.”

Which, okay, was a lie.

Dean didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what he was doing.

But what he _did_ know was that listening to Sam, wiping his hands of the situation and walking away wasn’t an option.

Besides, unless he entered the game again how was he ever going to speak to Jimmy?

A conversation that he suddenly felt was absolutely critical.

Because in the midst of Sam’s narrative of his conversation with Woolfe, Dean had finally remembered the odd thing Jimmy had said about speaking to Castiel ‘here’.

Did that mean what Dean now _thought_ it meant?

If it did, if Jimmy believed Castiel could follow him into the real world, like Anael and Cain supposedly had followed Anna and Richard, then Jimmy was probably going to be the best measure by which Dean could judge whether what was happening in Moondoor was _truly_ real or not.

Because Dean wasn’t an idiot.

He completely understood and sympathized with Sam’s point of view.

Everything Dean knew or thought he knew had come from an ‘imaginary friend’. His own behaviors and beliefs were those of an unreliable narrator since he couldn’t, hand on heart, swear irrevocably that they were true. Everything he was experiencing, everything he believed, could simply be symptoms of neurological damage caused by a flawed immersion tank.

Yet, if so, how did he know what he knew?

That was the crux of the matter.

How had he _already_ known so much about the events that had happened fifteen years earlier if Loki, the source of most of that information, was a figment of his imagination?

But he couldn’t use _that_ argument to convince his brother. Saying, ‘I already knew that because Loki told me’ wouldn’t wash. Sam would assume he was either lying about already knowing or, more likely, would considerately say something like ‘I know you _believe_ you already knew it, but it’s more likely a case of weird Déjà vu’ and then would start insisting he got tested for epilepsy or something.

And, even as he visualized Sam’s probable response he had to reluctantly admit to himself that neurological damage _could_ trigger a form of epilepsy which would give him those types of false memories so could he even prove he_ had_ known those facts before this conversation? Had he ever shared any of Loki’s more obscure comments with any of the others?

For a moment, he was paralyzed by panic as he doubted his own sanity.

Then he remembered he had told Charlie just about everything. 

And that made him feel better.

Somewhat.

Until he remembered the other thing that had occurred to him during Sam’s narrative.

Last time, Richard Roman had killed the other Knights of Hell and the players had died in real life as a direct result.

Which meant that if Dean followed the path set for him, following in Richard’s footprints, didn’t that logically mean he would be killing the new Knights in real life too? Murdering them? And, unlike Richard, he wouldn't be doing it by 'accident'. He wouldn't be able to claim he hadn't known the consequences of his actions. If he decided to continue 'playing' this game, Dean would be consciously deciding to murder nine people (admittedly nasty people, but if that was a justified criteria for killing someone the world would contain a lot fewer dickheads) in order to save two hundred thousand. Which, yeah, as a maths problem was pretty open and shut but this wasn't maths, this was reality and Dean wasn't a _soldier, _acting on orders, well, unless Chuck counted.

Did Chuck count?

Did acting on the behest of a _virtual_ God truly make this quest 'righteous'?

He wondered how Jimmy would feel about needing to absorb the concept of premeditated _murder_ into his existential crisis.

Dean had a feeling a magic 8 ball would definitely reply the chances were 'not good'.


	49. The placebo effect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: There is a non-graphic scene of sexual assault in this one. No major characters are involved.

“You’re looking remarkably well, today,” Ruby said, her eyes narrowed in suspicion, as she caught up with him and then kept pace. Which was easy enough to do. Jimmy wasn’t using his stick this morning, or shuffling like an old man, but he still felt as awkward as a new-born colt and his footsteps were slow and tentative as he tested out the long unfamiliar sensation of walking unassisted.

He startled slightly at her arrival at his side. He hadn’t noticed her presence when he’d entered the corridor. Still, despite his minor alarm, her words caused him to flush with pleasure.

“It’s noticeable, then?” he asked. “I felt better when I woke up this morning and when I looked in my mirror I _thought_ I looked better but I wasn’t sure if it was wishful thinking on my part.”

“Well, you still look like you’ve got one foot in the grave,” she admitted bluntly. “Even in the improbable event of you somehow managing to stumble onto some miracle cure, the effects of twenty-three years of on-off chemo won’t disappear overnight. Plus, you’re barely 120lbs soaking wet which by itself always tends to give a tall guy like you the appearance of being one of the living dead.”

“Um… thank you for the pep talk,” Jimmy replied dryly.

Ruby shrugged. “I’m here to please,” she said, then smirked. “Seriously, though, Mr. Novak, the other day I thought a strong enough wind might just blow you away. Today… well, today you look a hundred percent better. You must be eating your Wheaties.”

“I _was_ on my way to breakfast,” he replied. “I’m feeling somewhat hungry this morning.”

“I don’t think that’s surprising under the circumstances,” she mused.

“What circumstances?”

“Well, it’s peculiar, really. We had an anomalous reading from your immersion rig yesterday. During your eight-hour session, you somehow utilized over 18,000 calories. It caused an amount of alarm with the rig techs as they don’t normally see usage of more than 800 calories max during that length of time. After all, the tank is only supplying the nutritional needs of a body being held in virtual stasis so it made absolutely no sense why your body used that much energy whilst being held suspended and inactive. So the techs put it down to some form of glitch, either with the nutrition tube or the tank itself. Which means, I guess, that maybe you didn’t get _any_ nutrition at all yesterday if the tube was faulty. Well, that or you really _are_ burning that kind of energy at the moment. Either way, it explains your appetite this morning, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it does,” Jimmy agreed.

“I am utilizing a large amount of energy to conduct my repairs,” Castiel interjected.

“_Then this IS your doing? You really are curing me_?”

“I am deactivating your faulty T-cells, by repairing their switches and setting them into an off-position. As I clearly stated I could do,” Castiel replied testily.

“_I didn’t_…” Jimmy started, then hesitated. He thought that saying he hadn’t believed the Angel could truly do that might be offensive.

“I can hear your thoughts,” Castiel pointed out dryly. “There is no necessity for you to speak the words for me to know what you are thinking.”

Jimmy pondered that as he entered the dining room, approached the buffet counter and proceeded to load a tray with two glasses of juice and enough food to feed a small army. Ruby watched him with narrowed eyes, then shrugged, turned on her heels and flounced away without another word.

He settled himself at a table and began eating before he ‘spoke’ to Castiel again.

“_That’s not fair_,” he pointed out. “_Because I can’t read _your _thoughts, can I? If we are sharing my ‘headspace’, as Dean calls it, there should be parity between us_.”

“I do not believe that is possible,” Castiel replied, after a thoughtful pause. “Your mental abilities are constrained by the limitations of flesh. Mine are not. We cannot have equality because we are _not_ equal.”

Jimmy nearly choked on his French toast. “_Well, that was blunt_ _and not a little rude_.”

“I did not intend offense. It is merely a truism. Your consciousness cannot, for example, choose to leave the prison of your flesh and occupy my former position within Moondoor. I, conversely, could choose to occupy your flesh and take possession of it in this world,” Castiel said. “Perhaps, I should clarify that it is not something I wish to do.”

Weirdly, despite his automatic horror at the idea Castiel was claiming he could take over like an alien bodysnatcher, Jimmy’s primary reaction to that comment was indignation. “_Because my body is too much of a fixer-upper to be worth stealing_?” he demanded, bitterly. “_Because I’m dying_?”

“That is no longer strictly true,” Castiel replied. “I calculate it will take no longer than ten more days to fully repair your substructure. It is critical that I locate and repair _every_ individual faulty cell since leaving even a single one active would eventually prove fatal, but on the assumption that particular absolute can be successfully achieved, you will then be completely repaired. After which time, exercise and nutrition will be all that is required to complete your vessel’s return to full health.”

This time Jimmy _did_ choke. Since his mouth was filled with orange juice at the time it wasn’t pretty. It was also rather terrifying since, for a moment, he was convinced he was actually going to drown on the mouthful of orange juice that had gone down towards his lungs. But, before any of the clinic staff could reach him to assist, his body seemed to convulse of its own volition and expelled the juice from his trachea in an explosive arc that sprayed over his remaining breakfast.

He smiled in weak apology at the nurse who hurried over to clean up the mess he had made, then nodded gratefully at her offer to replace the ruined food with a fresh tray.

“My efforts to repair you would be more efficient if I did not have to divert my attention to deal with avoidable crises,” Castiel castigated him.

_“You’re seriously claiming you just gave me some kind of internal Heimlich_?”

“I am always serious. The human body is a complex structure but well within my capacity to restore from _any_ eventuality.”

“_You’re claiming you can cure any disease?” _Jimmy demanded incredulously.

“Not necessarily ‘cure’. I believe it is possible to control the _effects_ of any disease, but the eradication of the illness itself might prove problematical in some instances. Furthermore, there is always a cost/benefit ratio to consider. For instance, it is theoretically possible for one such as myself to animate a vessel that is deceased. However, the effort required to perform such a task would exceed any perceived benefit should it be done for an extended period.”

“_You’re claiming you can raise the dead_?” Jimmy scoffed.

“Of course not. I cannot return life when it has ceased altogether. A fleshly body, however, is merely a vessel for the lifeforce inhabiting it. The lifeforce may perish but the vessel would remain useable for a finite amount of time. Should, for example, you suffer a fatal accident whilst hosting me I could, in theory, animate your vessel to return to the immersion tank so that I might return to my world. In my case, of course, that is a purely academic argument since I have no other vessel to reside in within Moondoor should I do so.”

“_Animate_?” Jimmy demanded uncomfortably, imagining his body shuffling zombie-like into the treatment room.

“Not in the way you are visualizing,” Castiel replied. “It would be theoretically possible for me to integrate almost seamlessly into control of your vessel and operate it indefinitely. To become the lifeforce now residing within the vessel. Similarly, perhaps, to the way a human consciousness resides in a digital avatar. However, that would be a far from an optimum scenario in this mortal world.”

“_For both of us, considering the minor fact that I would be deceased_,” Jimmy pointed out sardonically.

“Indeed,” Castiel agreed. “However I was most directly referring to the impracticality of the scenario. I would be obliged to manually maintain the basic functions of your body. A vast amount of my processing power would be permanently engaged in the operation of essential life-supporting functions. Additionally, a fleshly body is in a constant state of decay so it can only be operated for a finite amount of time.”

“_So a human body is a suitable vacation retreat but not desirable as a permanent residence_?” Jimmy asked dryly.

After a moment of consideration, Castiel concurred. “I believe that I would prefer you to perish in Moondoor should the regrettable situation occur. The prospect of it occurring in this world would be unwelcome to me.”

Jimmy boggled wordlessly for a while. “_If I die in Moondoor, we perish together. If I die here, you would survive? But you don’t want to_?”

“I believe I would be ill-suited to be permanently imprisoned within a fleshly vessel,” Castiel stated.

“_I know you don’t have another body to transfer to, but couldn’t you return to Moondoor and seed yourself into a new host_?” Jimmy asked, intrigued despite himself by the theory Castiel was proposing.

“As a seraph, I lack the ability to do so even should a willing vessel become available during such a circumstance. Only the Arch Angels have the ability to seed themselves within a host. If you recall, I was not personally responsible for my own seeding into your vessel.”

“_So only Arch Angels can body hop at will_?”

“That is my understanding. Additionally, an Arch Angel can be the instrument by which an Angel is seeded. My brother, Balthazar, for instance, was undoubtedly seeded within Crowley by an Arch Angel.”

“Because Arch Angels are far more complex programs?” Jimmy asked.

“Yes, they have demonstrably greater abilities to manipulate metadata within Moondoor,” Castiel agreed.

“_But all Angels, whether Arch or not, have the ability to ‘cure’ human bodies they are inhabiting_?”

“The task is not an overly complex one. Arresting the decay of age would be exceedingly onerous,” Castiel replied, “And perhaps chronic conditions might require a permanent presence which returns me to a cost/benefit consideration, but many injuries and diseases beyond the scope of human medicine could easily be repaired by Angels such as myself.”

“_Then why the hell is RRE messing about selling Moondoor as a _game?” Jimmy demanded incredulously. “_If what you’re saying is true, Richard Roman hasn’t just created artificial intelligences equal or superior to human ones. He has discovered the cure for cancer_.”

“It is not specifically the….”

“_Shut up_,” Jimmy snapped impatiently. “_Do you know how irritating that is_?”

“What is?” Castiel replied, sounding more bemused than offended.

“_Pedantry_,” Jimmy replied. It was weird but for the second time that day he felt like he had looked in a mirror but _this_ time he hadn’t liked what he saw. He empathized fully when Castiel failed to understand a colloquialism. He too struggled with the bizarre lexicon many people used to communicate and was frequently frustrated when his inability to understand was perceived as _his_ fault, rather than that of the person who had used such illogical figures of speech as expressive devices.

But, he considered now, as Castiel’s laborious sophistry began to grate on his last nerve, Jimmy’s own tendency to be a pedant didn’t originate from the same blameless position as his inability to understand idioms.

“I’ve just realized something,” he told the Angel. “I’m a grown adult but I’m still behaving like a spoiled brat.”

Because that _was _the origin of his unfortunate tendency to nit-pick conversationally, wasn’t it? Too many years of being locked in rooms with indifferent tutors, often bored out of his mind, with his only entertainment being the fact he could run intellectual rings around most of them. Considered from that light, much of his current behavior was inexcusable. It was surprising Dean hadn’t found him too tiresome to deal with from the first day. Although it was true that Dean often _did_ leave him floundering with his colorful vocabulary, many of Jimmy’s finicky responses to Dean’s conversational forays had been deliberate efforts on his part to evidence his more intellectual background.

“I believe you are judging yourself with unfair severity,” Castiel interjected. “I was in attendance for all of those conversations and do not recognize that derogatory self-appraisal as being valid. I believe it is an inarguable fact that Dean’s lexicon is frequently extremely uncouth.”

Jimmy chuckled. Uncouth. As Dean would put it, ‘who says that?’.

But there was no point arguing with Castiel because, let’s face it, they both shared the same unfortunate personality quirks.

Which was an odd coincidence.

Or was it?

What if it was _too much_ of a coincidence?

What if the real reason he and Castiel shared the same odd quirks had nothing to do with a benevolent virtual ‘God’ deciding they would be a more effective team if they shared certain personality traits. What if the real answer was the most obvious one?

The reason Castiel failed to understand colloquialisms _wasn’t_ that he was a virtual intelligence who was completely unfamiliar with human interactions.

It was that Castiel was just a figment of his own imagination. An auditory hallucination.

“I believed we had already resolved that particular apprehension,” Castiel interrupted wearily. “Do we really have to repeat the whole rigmarole of our previous conversation?”

“_I don’t believe you’re real_,” Jimmy muttered.

“You doubt my existence?”

“_Now?”_ Jimmy said, truthfully. “_Yes. Yes, I do.”_

“But surely your improved physical state is firm _evidence _of my existence,” Castiel pointed out reasonably.

Which was exactly the wrong thing for him to say, from Jimmy’s point of view, because wasn’t his physical state the real crux of his latest psychological crisis?

“_What if this is a psychosomatic response on my part,”_ Jimmy pointed out. “_A placebo effect.”_

“Humans are most peculiar creatures,” Castiel announced. “You were willing to suspend your disbelief until I gifted you with the one thing you needed most, and now you repudiate me because I have done so?”

“_Gift horses have sharp teeth_,” Jimmy replied. “_Look, I apologize for my seeming ingratitude. It is a human thing perhaps. I cannot afford to believe you are healing me, Castiel, because I don’t think I can survive any more _hope_. I have made peace with my death. I haven’t requested anything from you. Certainly, I did not request a cure. I only wished for the opportunity to make my life meaningful in some way_.”

“I understand,” Castiel replied gravely. “It is a defensive mechanism on your part to reject the possibility of a cure because you do not wish to face possible disappointment.”

“_Basically_. _The thing is, you’re telling me you’re curing me. Saving my life. Do you have even the slightest idea how many doctors have told me the same thing in the past? Do you know how many times I have believed them, only to find out they were wrong? I don’t believe in words anymore. Words are cheap. And, yes, of course I feel better today. Look better, even. But that’s how the placebo effect works. A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself_.”

“Except you yourself said you didn’t believe me anyway,” Castiel pointed out. "However, this is a human medical facility, is it not? Surely you can utilize the facilities here to verify the veracity of my assertion?”

Jimmy took a deep steadying breath as he contemplated that.

Of course. Blood tests didn’t lie.

He needed to find Ruby. 

He rose to his feet, trying to ignore how _easy_ that process felt compared to the normal effort of righting himself, and left the dining room in search of the nurse.

A search that took less than two minutes, since she was hovering, suspiciously, in the corridor outside.

“Were you waiting for me,” he accused.

“World doesn’t revolve around you, cupcake,” she smirked.

Not for the first time, Jimmy wondered why she reminded him so much of Meg. Not in appearance, admittedly, but in attitude definitely.

“I want bloods done,” he said, without any further prevarication. “I need to know whether I am genuinely feeling better or just _think_ I am.”

She stared at him for a long moment, some indefinable emotion clouding her expression, then she shrugged lightly. “Follow me,” she said, and led him towards one of the unoccupied treatment rooms.

She closed the door behind them, rummaged in a cabinet for the relevant items, then told him to remove his dressing gown, sit down and roll the sleeve of his pj’s up.

As she fitted a tourniquet around his upper arm to slow his blood flow, she said, “This will bruise like a mother. You’re so skinny it would be like getting blood out of a stone anyway, but I’ve only done this a couple of times before .”

“So you’re not really a nurse?” Jimmy clarified.

“Sometimes I am. I wear a lot of hats. Basically, I’m whatever RRE need me to be,” Ruby said, with a careless shrug.

Jimmy wrenched his arm back away from her needle.

Ruby rolled her eyes and huffed impatiently. “I’m fully qualified, you idiot. RRE doesn’t do lawsuits. I just haven’t actually done this since my training course.”

Jimmy reluctantly offered his arm again.

“I’m going to take two vials,” she said. “We can run a CBC overnight, get your cell counts which will give us a good indication of whether or not this is a psychosomatic response rather than a genuine one, but it’ll take a week to get results if we test for immunoglobulins too. So we’ll do both. It’s not like you can’t afford it.”

“I thought RRE were paying for my medical procedures here.”

“They are,” Ruby agreed. “But I assumed you’d want to keep these particular tests on the down-low.”

Jimmy frowned at her, totally perplexed. “I would prefer that,” he agreed, cautiously, “but I fail to comprehend why you would make that offer. Are you not intending to report this to your employers?”

“Of course I am,” Ruby shrugged. “Why would I go out on a limb for you? I barely even know you. But…” she smirked at him, “It would be mutually advantageous if my report is made _only_ to my direct superior. Then it will be up to _him_ whether to disseminate that knowledge more widely and he prefers to keep most information close to his chest.”

…

“Hey,” one of the players said, nervously, as he slowly approached their campfire.

The other player conspicuously raised her hand to her waist, pushing back her cloak to reveal the hilt of her dagger but she, too, offered him a cautious smile even as she did do.

Both were level 12.

Perfect.

“Hi,” he said, grinning widely with his remarkably white teeth. “Great to see you guys here. I was running away from some level 40 asshole from the Hounds of War and had to use a random port to escape him. I have absolutely no idea where I’ve landed but it seems like the back of beyond.”

“It kinda is,” the guy who had greeted him admitted. “We figured staying out in the boondocks was the best way for us to survive until we level up enough to find a decent-sized Guild that will let us join.”

“Good luck with that,” he sighed, pushing his overlong hair away from his face in a gesture he hoped looked nervous. “Everyone I’ve met so far has looked at my level and either laughed at me and told me to come back when I know what I’m doing, or has just tried to kill me immediately.”

“They’re all assholes,” the girl said, pouting prettily. “We’ve been playing Moondoor for nearly six months now. We’re not newbies. We just don’t have money to buy our way up the levels like most of the big Guild members have. So we decided ‘fuck ‘em all’ and started our own two-man Guild. At least we get in-game Guild bonuses and quests that way.”

“That’s a great idea,” he said, wide-eyed as he stared at them in evident awe. “Why didn’t I think of that? Even being in a one-guy ‘Guild’ would offer me more XP than going it alone.”

“Probably too busy running for your life,” the guy laughed. “I’m Hadez. This is MoonPrincess. She’s my game-wife, so don’t get any ideas about her.”

“He gets jealous,” the girl laughed, mock-pouting at Hadez but clearly thrilled by the fact.

Nick grinned. “I’m not surprised, pretty girl like you.”

She snickered and tossed her hair back, revealing cute pointed elf ears. She _was_ a pretty little thing, Nick decided. Or, at least, inside a pretty little avatar. Didn’t matter what she really looked like, anyway, did it? In-game she looked perfectly fuckable, so that was all that counted.

“So, that’s a bespoke avatar, huh?” Hadez pointed out, as Nick finally reached near enough to be seen closely in the firelight. His tone was suddenly a lot less friendly. “Can’t see how you can afford _that_ and not be higher than a level 15.”

And that, Nick decided, was the _one_ problem with his new avatar. There was absolutely no way anyone was going to mistake his new appearance as that of a generic game avatar.

Still, he was close enough now that it didn’t really matter.

His crude bone dagger was already deep inside Hadez’s guts before the girl even started screaming. He quietened her with a punch from his huge hand that laid her out cold in one blow. In fact, she went down so hard he worried for a moment he had killed her. He was still trying to get used to being inside a far larger frame than usual.

But she was alive and unconscious.

Perfect.

He really needed to find some nice NPC’s’s to play with. Characters that couldn’t just log-out of the game when things stopped being ‘fun’. Roman had told him to use ‘any means necessary’ to ensure he leveled up as quickly as possible and Nick was pretty sure he’d get a lot more XP from slowly torturing someone to death than simply stabbing them in the guts.

So a nice little village of NPC’s would fit the bill quite nicely.

Killing _players_ was always good for a healthy XP boost regardless of how he did it. Even a couple of level 12 nobodies like these two. But nothing was quite as satisfying as listening to people scream.

Moon Princess was out cold and unable to log-out and he’d get more XP if he waited for her to regain consciousness before killing her.

Still, no point wasting the time it took her to wake up.

Time, he decided, to find out whether his new Avatar was as physically impressive in _every_ aspect as he was assuming it would be.

He unbuttoned the fly of his britches and grinned with satisfaction at the monster his fingers loosened. The last vestiges of his resentment at being forced to play in this new unfamiliar avatar instantly vanished.

That would do nicely, he decided. Very nicely indeed.

He made short work of ripping Moon Princess’s dress off, exposing the pale flesh of her Avatar to the flickering firelight.

And as he buried himself between her creamy thighs, Nick decided this Knights of Hell gig was one hell of a fine way to earn a living.


	50. A beast of a different color.

Despite leaving Donald Woolfe’s office with the distinct impression his _Wednesday _security pass would definitely not include access to the Ninth floor, Sam had gained one unexpected concession the previous evening during their second glass of whiskey. Woolfe had told him he didn’t need to worry about billables for the immediate future.

Not having to log a minimum number of billable hours meant that Sam wasn’t tied down to being at his desk during office hours. He wouldn’t even need to manufacture off-site appointments to justify any side-excursions. So even if the older man apparently believed the information he had provided during the conversation had been sufficient to wipe his own hands of the matter, he was indirectly offering assistance anyway. By removing him from the billables structure, Woolfe had effectively gifted Sam with carte blanche to do whatever he needed to do to deal with the RRE situation.

Which was why, at the same stupidly early time as Jimmy was spewing orange juice over his breakfast table, Sam was already standing inside Razer in San Francisco dressed in jeans and a band t-shirt, rather than a suit, and attempting to look like he might belong there.

Admittedly, not terribly well.

Considering he must be _barely_ older than the sales-guys in store, Sam still felt ancient in comparison. Like a fish out of water, he found himself floundering completely when surrounded by the neon flashing lights and the excited players who were jostling each other to clamber onto the free-to-use gaming rigs. They looked like teenage aliens, in their VR goggles, their hands wrapped in haptic gloves making wild gestures as they fought imaginary foes.

No immersion tanks were on offer though, he noted.

“I was thinking of playing Moondoor,” he told the squat, acne-ridden sales guy, who honestly looked about thirteen, when he finally left the gaggle of his colleagues and, clearly reluctantly, wandered over to assist the ‘old guy’.

Maybe he’d lost a bet.

“Not much call for that,” the sales guy replied with a careless shrug. “Don’t think we even have a copy in stock.”

Sam frowned in confusion. “I was told, by a friend, it’s really popular.”

“Well, duh, yeah,” the guy scoffed. “Best game ever.” He rolled his eyes rudely, like Sam was a moron.

“But you don’t sell it,” Sam pointed out, with a sneer of equal ridicule.

“Look, the kind of guys who come here are _serious_ about gaming. Gaming is LIFE, ya know? And, sure, I know RRE claims you can play Moondoor with nothing more than your home pc, a modem and a basic pair of VR googles but that’s bullshit. You can get into the game, right, but you’ll last maybe five minutes before you get stomped on by a _real_ player. If you aren’t willing to play the game properly, why bother?”

“So you’re saying I’d need an immersion rig to play it?” Sam asked, sighing in exaggerated disappointment. “Damn, I really can’t afford to spend _that_ much. I was thinking maybe a grand maximum.”

The sales guy blinked, his eyes reassessing Sam… clocking his casual clothes, assessing the value of his watch and his trainers perhaps, deciding the ‘old guy’ might know fuck all about gaming and be unwilling to spend multiple thousands on getting started but might still be worth a _reasonable_ commission after all.

“Let me be honest,” he said. “An immersion tank is definitely the only way to go if you’re totally serious about the game _but_ who’s got that kind of money, huh? And you _can_ set up a half-decent rig for less than a grand if you already own a suitable computer.”

Sam named the brand and model of his laptop and the guy sneered slightly, then shrugged and reluctantly agreed it would ‘do the job’.

“But you don’t sell the game,” Sam pointed out.

“Nobody who comes here would _buy_ the game,” the sales guy laughed. “Thing is, sure you can buy it off a shelf in a package for $49.99 and boot it up on your computer and see lots of pretty graphics but that’s all bullshit because all you’re actually loading on your computer is a connection interface. Moondoor itself is fully web-based. You have to be on-line to use it, with a super-fast broadband connection. And depending on the quality of your VR equipment, you’re probably going to use a fair amount of electricity too.

“Now, don’t get me wrong. You _can _play it with any broadband or electricity supplier. Lots of people just buy the program in GameZone, buy some basic VR kit for a few hundred and get going. But those people aren’t ‘gamers’. Real gamers swap their utility supplies to RRE. If you swap to RRE Power, you get broadband and electricity for not _much_ more than you’re already paying, but the broadband is unlimited so it soon pays for itself. And, they give you a copy of Moondoor for free. Sign up to a ten-year off-grid utility contract and they even throw in a free VR hood and gloves.”

“Really?” Sam asked, and his surprise wasn’t totally faked. Sure, he’d already learned that RRE owned several of its own power plants but he hadn’t fully understood how comprehensive the company’s business model was. Moondoor wasn’t even their primary product anymore. It was simply used as a lure to generate a far greater revenue stream. Sam had been considering the quarter of a million-odd worldwide regular players of the game to be the source of all RRE’s income, with the power being supplied purely to support those players’ addiction.

But if the Razer sales guy was right, RRE was presumably locking the majority of people who played Moondoor into long-term utility contracts even if they only played the game once and decided it wasn’t their ‘thing’. Because the power was off-grid and the broadband was cable, both required totally new connections to be laid so the ‘ten-year’ was a complete misnomer anyway. The odds of anyone ever leaving RRE Power to return to standard grid-connection was highly improbable.

“Just out of interest,” he said, “how many people do you think start to play Moondoor and then decide it’s not for them and quit almost immediately?”

The salesman’s face pursed, as though giving an answer would pain him. Then he sighed heavily, “I guess the ratio is 10-1 in the first three months,” he admitted reluctantly. “But you don’t look like a quitter to me. ‘Sides, the way you need to look at it is that we’re all living in a world that is becoming more and more dependent on the internet. I bet ten years from now everyone will _need_ an RRE super-fast, unlimited broadband connection. People will be queuing to get it installed. So I say save your grand on VR equipment, don’t even waste $49.99. Just get ahead of the curve, grab an RRE utility contract now, since, let’s face it, you already pay utilities anyway and a few dollars a month more… well you won’t even notice it, will you? That way you can treat the Moondoor stuff as just a free bonus for buying something you already _need_.”

“That makes sense. How do I go about signing up?” Sam asked, enthusiastically.

“Just wait here. I happen to have all the forms out the back. We get a lot of smart guys like you calling in here all the time. Guys who can see through the bullshit. I swear I sell more RRE Power these days than anything else,” the salesman chuckled.

Sam waited until he disappeared behind the counter in search of the forms, then turned and slipped out of the store and hurried down the street away from Razer.

His mind was reeling with the new information.

He could see how it all fitted together, how it all made sense, but it completely scuppered his initial fledgling plan to bring Richard Roman to his knees. Moondoor was just a by-product now. It was no longer the lynchpin of RRE’s finances. Take the game down and _RRE Power_ would remain. RRE Power which might already have over 2 million customers locked into contract if the sales guy’s statistics were right. RRE and RRE Power were totally different legal entities. Take RRE down and RRE Power might need to rebrand itself but it would continue running and bringing in a huge amount of revenue.

Richard Roman might be insane. But he clearly was still a genius.

Yet, since Sam’s primary objective was to get _Moondoor_ taken off-line, perhaps it was irrelevant that Richard Roman himself remained fundamentally untouchable.

It was simply a case of priorities.

And, on the positive side, he could use the RRE Power information to add substance to the conspiracy theory idea. It would add meat to the bones of the story he intended to disseminate on-line.

He hailed a cab to take him back to the airport to hop on the short commuter flight home. He needed actual facts and figures to support the RRE Power aspect of the story and he had a pretty good idea that Mortimer Blake would probably be able to supply them.

…

“Yo,” Ash said from behind the counter, as Dean wheeled himself into ‘Lil Beanz. “Americano, Bacon and French Toast coming right up.”

Dean smiled appreciatively, then glanced around the deserted coffee shop as he settled at a table.

“It’s okay, Charlie’s upstairs. I told her we wanted a bit of guy-time this morning before logging on, so she agreed to leave us alone for a bit,” Ash said, with a conspiratorial wink.

“She’s not offended?” Dean checked. He was still feeling a bit guilty about phoning Ash first thing and saying he wanted to speak with him privately. Not _that_ guilty, obviously, or he would have suggested Ash visited him in secret rather than giving in to the lure of Ash’s offer to come over and have breakfast. But, still…

“Nah, she’s cool. She understands we’re old friends and, regardless of how welcoming you’ve been to her, she knows she isn’t going to dive into the role of your BFF in less than a week. Think she’s definitely jockeying for the position though. You kinda have that effect on people,” he chuckled, with another wink.

“She’s very full-on,” Dean said, “But she’s kinda like the little sister I never wanted but managed to acquire anyway. Irritating as hell sometimes but I’d still punch the lights out of anyone who gives her shit.”

“Word,” Ash agreed, loading a tray and bringing the coffee and breakfast items to the table. “So, what’s the crack?”

“I think I lied to Sam,” Dean said, mopily, as he reached for the syrup and poured a generous splash over his plate. “Or not. Dunno. Need to ask you something and it’s a bit… awkward.”

“So you finally managed to get hold of him?” Ash asked, honing in on what he considered the most important part of what Dean had said.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed.

“And he’s okay? He’s safe?” Ash demanded.

“Hard to answer that one,” Dean admitted. “Best I just tell you the gist of our conversation.”

Ash continued to eat, listening wordlessly as Dean quickly outlined the details of his argum… conversation… with Sam, then left Dean waiting expectantly as he continued to methodically clear his plate. Then, finally, he placed his fork down and fixed Dean with a serious expression.

“Okay, so I gotta ask you something, man. Where the fuck did you _ever _get the idea I was squeamish about accepting the idea of the Moondoor V.I’s being alive?”

Dean flushed. “Like I told Sam, I thought you believed it but didn’t _want _to believe it… Kinda… well… you know…because of… um…” he trailed off awkwardly.

“You’re talking about the blood thing, aren’t you?” Ash suggested dryly.

“Well, um, you _do_ faint if someone gets as much as a paper cut,” Dean argued. “That’s why you don’t use an immersion tank, isn’t it?”

Ash shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“It’s not the blood, man. It’s _everything_. Any bodily fluid,” he explained, his face scrunching with palpable distaste. “Blood, saliva, piss, shit, all of it. And it’s nothing to do with being ‘squeamish’. I have a _phobia_, Dean. It doesn’t affect my ability to _reason _but I can’t prevent my physical reaction regardless. The idea of touching, or being touched by, anyone else’s bodily fluids makes me want to retch. Even virtual fluids. Hence my deliberately avoiding the use of any rig that is too realistic. I need to keep the whole thing ‘fake’ enough to know that crap isn’t _really_ touching me. Real or virtual makes no difference to my hindbrain. Gaming is supposed to be fun. It isn’t supposed to make me want to puke. So the point is, it makes no difference to me whatsoever whether the fluids are REAL or not. Either way, just the thought of them makes me want to chuck my cookies.

“As for an immersion tank… urrrggghhh…. Just the _idea_ of climbing inside one makes me barf. Even if only I ever used it and the gel was sanitized or replaced between every session, just the idea of sliding my bare skin inside that stuff is just…. Urrgghh ….nasty. And that’s before we even mention nutrition tubes, waste tubes, breathing tubes, I mean, urrrgghhhh.”

Dean blinked at Ash in astonishment, noting that even _talking_ about the subject had caused Ash to turn a peculiar shade of puce.

“Why the fuck do you think I bought this place?” Ash demanded.

“Sam said it was just to give me a job,” Dean said, then flinched and held his breath as he waited for Ash’s reaction.

Which was just a shrug. “I guess,” Ash admitted carelessly, “but the reason it’s a _coffee_ house, not any other kind of business, is that I _love_ coffee. I particularly love _barista_ coffee. What turns my stomach is the idea of someone _else _preparing that coffee with their dirty, grubby, unwashed fingers_._ Do you know how many people don’t wash their hands properly after using the bathroom? The amount of urine and fecal matter lurking on an average Barista’s fingertips?”

Dean’s own stomach turned at the thought but, since he was on a roll with this total honesty gig, he said, “Sam said you gave me a job because you’re in _love_ with me.”

Ash froze for a minute, blinking like a deer caught in a hunter’s sights, then he expelled a deep breath, shrugged with faux nonchalance, and said, “Yeah, I guess that’s true too.”

It was Dean’s turn to freeze as thoughts chased through his head like a herd of stampeding wildebeest. “I, um… I…” he mumbled awkwardly.

Ash’s response was a full-on laugh. “Stop it. You’ll give yourself a coronary, Dean. Me saying it out loud doesn’t change anything. I have no expectations of you. I don’t want anything from you that I don’t already have. First time I ever saw a picture of you I was blown away. Which, come to think of it, was probably pretty sick shit considering you were only fifteen and I was fixing you some false I.D. but I never wanted anything from you _then_, either. I never ‘shipped us, Dean. I never will. Just let me be the Sancho to your Don Quixote. I don’t want to be your Dulcinea. I don’t want to be _anyone’s_ Dulcinea,” he shuddered, and he grimaced at the thought.

“I get that,” Dean agreed thoughtfully, as he considered the impossibility of even _kissing_ someone if you had a full-blown phobia of bodily fluids. “But I was thinking a lot last night, after Sam’s call, and despite the fact you’d imagine I was worrying about the apocalyptic shit doing down in Moondoor, all I actually kept coming back to was _Lisa Braeden_.”

“Ahhh,” Ash sighed. “Thought that bitch would come up.”

Dean frowned unhappily. “She wasn’t a bitch. She tried to…”

“She tried to _fix_ you,” Ash snarled. “Like you were something broken.”

Dean barked an unhappy laugh, gesturing at his legs, “Which I kind of am, Ash.”

“Fuck that,” Ash snorted. “Your chair isn’t you. Your severed spinal cord isn’t who you are. YOU aren’t broken. You don’t need ‘fixing’ and you sure as hell don’t need some crazy cow thinking Reiki is going to miraculously regenerate your nerve cells and then giving up on you when all her candles and incense and laying of hands don’t pan out.”

“So, you didn’t hate her just because she was my girlfriend?” Dean clarified cautiously.

Ash snorted and shook his head firmly. “When you first told me the hot little number in the yoga pants was more interested in jumping on your dick than offering you physical therapy, my first thought was _great._ Well, my _first_ thought was ‘Yuck’ but that’s just me and the whole idea of baby batter.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Dean gagged. “You trying to make _me_ puke now?”

Ash shrugged an apology. “Point is, man, that I had no problem with her wanting to ride you. I just got pissed when instead of accepting you for who you are, she tried to _fix_ you.”

“I think she actually wanted to fix my _dick_,” Dean admitted, with a blush. “Don’t think she particularly cared about the wheels.”

“Whatever,” Ash shrugged. “Point is she was a crazy bitch and you deserve better.”

“Okay,” Dean nodded. “Thanks. I just needed to check I wasn’t being ‘oblivious’.”

“That what Sam said?” Ash asked, mouth twisted unhappily.

Dean nodded.

“Yeah, well he can be a bit of a judgemental asshole sometimes,” Ash pointed out. “Course, that’s _your_ fault since you obviously raised him that way.”

Dean chuckled. “Yeah, I guess I must have.”

“So, tell me, is this conversation _really_ about Jimmy?” Ash asked, raising an eyebrow in query.

“Kinda,” Dean admitted, chewing on his lower lip.

“You want to jump his bones, I’ll cheer you on,” Ash smirked, then his expression sobered a little. “Just remember you don’t know anything about who he _really_ is. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind about me and Charlie tracking him down and digging up the dirt on him? Because we could, no problem."

“No. Absolutely not,” Dean said firmly. “Though that reminds me. Jimmy offered to send Charlie his old tank to use. A Gen 8 one. How can we do that without revealing where we are. Or, more to the point, _who_ we are?”

“You mean who _you_ are,” Ash retorted unhappily. “You’re assuming if he finds out about,” and he gestured at Dean’s legs, “he’ll pull a Lisa on you?”

“Maybe,” Dean admitted.

“If he does, then good riddance,” Ash snapped. “Though, could work the other way. He might be more inclined to let you get your leg over in-game if he realizes you’re a born-again virgin in real life.”

Dean snorted. “I’m not sure that’s even an option. I get the distinct impression _he’s_ a real-life genuine virgin and he’s also Catholic. Sex, particularly gay sex, is all fire, brimstone and damnation as far as he’s concerned.”

“Bummer. Still, you could tell him what happens in Vegas and all that,” Ash suggested.

“Tried that,” Dean said glumly. “He just said we _weren’t_ in Vegas.”

“Knowing him, he was probably just being literal rather than necessarily turning you down,” Ash laughed.

“What are we going to do, Ash?”

“About Jimmy?”

“About Moondoor. What if Sam’s right? Well, not about what he believes but about what he’s saying actually happened last time with the Knights. What if we’re _really_ talking about murdering people?”

Ash’s face twisted as he contemplated a reply. Eventually, after several minutes of oppressive silence, he finally said, “I think, if we’ve finished talking about your dick, it’s probably time to let Charlie come join us. I think she should be in this conversation too.”

Dean nodded his agreement. “Yeah. She understands Moondoor better than either of us anyway. Let’s find out what she thinks about all this. But not here. It’s well past time we were supposed to log in. Give me a chance to get home and then join me at The Roadhouse. I think it’s time for me to let Jimmy know what’s really going on.”

…

When he finally received the in-game email he’d been waiting for, Henry Albertus Magnus Hoffman IV nearly choked on his Eggs Benedict.

“Little Paki Fucker,” he snarled, proving he was both racist _and_ geographically challenged since he was assuming that ‘Johnny’, who had signed the communication, was really named something like ‘Raj’ and was most likely located in an _Indian_ call-center. His lack of geographical knowledge stemmed from disinterest. Henry Albertus Magnus Hoffman IV was the kind of card-carrying full-blooded American man who took extreme pride in the fact he didn’t own a passport. As far as he was concerned, America was not only the center of the Universe but, realistically, was the only part of the Universe that even mattered.

Magnus, as he preferred to be known, had no particular issue with the fact that RRE was apparently off-shoring their customer support (an assumption he was reaching mainly because the email was written in perfectly grammatically correct and yet somehow stilted English) since he supposed people in places of the world other than America might as well do _something_ useful. But he was pissed as hell that the uppity little bastard had dared not only to state there was nothing wrong with his system interface (when there most certainly definitely _was_ an issue) but also, even more insultingly, had made vague reference to a bad workman blaming his tools and had posted him several hyperlinks to _Help_ pages for new users of Moondoor.

The problem was, Magnus knew that nothing would be gained by sending a scathing reply.

A couple of years earlier he had engaged in an increasingly frustrating, if not downright hostile, email battle with an RRE bitch with the highly improbable name of ‘Celeste’. Her final mail to himself had been a diatribe of scathing insults in which she had stated that the only thing ‘wrong’ with his bespoke Avatar was the fact it was so totally unlike his true physical appearance that it was not in the least surprising he was constantly fumbling and tripping whilst in-game. She had typed that she was perfectly willing to replace the avatar free-of-charge with one more suitable for a ‘short, fat, unpleasant little troll with a minuscule dick’.

For two whole seconds he had been thrilled speechless by imagining not only having the bitch fired but imagining the impossible number of zeros on the lawsuit he would file against RRE.

And then his monitor screen had filled with a large, laughing, Jolly Roger skull before going dark forever as his computer crashed so badly its motherboard overheated, smoke poured out of his tower unit and, inside its burning depths, his smoldering hard drive was corrupted beyond repair.

Magnus liked to fight and loved to win. But, like most natural bullies, he had healthy avoidance instincts whenever he found himself faced with an opponent who could fight back so effectively.

Perhaps ‘Johnny’ was not of the same breed as ‘Celeste’ but Magnus was unwilling to take the chance of having another melted motherboard, so he just deleted the tech support email with a snarl of disgust.

It appeared he was stuck with the glitchy system interface after all.

…

“I would probably need to check with Charles Shurley,” the Archivist said. “I’m uncertain exactly which documentation was removed after the unfortunate incident at Miss Middleton’s residence but I doubt the most current list of subscribers to RRE Power has ever been located here. This is an _archive_, Master Winchester. It’s where documents go to _die_.”

Sam nodded his understanding, trying to achieve a balance between appearing attentive and ignoring the ravenous way Mortimer Blake was devouring the huge Breakfast Burrito that Sam had delivered along with his request for access to the vault containing RRE’s archived records. Since it was already nearly mid-morning, and he had no doubt the Archivist had already broken fast before his own arrival, the older man’s ravenous chewing was somewhat disturbing.

How could the guy remain so cadaverously thin when he had an appetite that put Dean’s to shame?

Well, the appetite Dean had previously evidenced when he’d been a teenager, Sam considered grimly. Sometimes he seriously believed that the thing Dean resented _most_ about being paralyzed by his accident was the fact he now had to be a lot more careful about the number of calories he ingested.

Not a concern, apparently, that Blake shared.

“Cheesy nachos?” Sam offered, delving into his bag to produce the second part of his bribe.

The Archivist grinned widely, causing his face to appear even more skull-like than usual, and hungrily snatched the box from his hands.

“I was actually more interested in some more historical paperwork anyway,” Sam admitted. “I’m particularly interested in the incorporation documents for RRE Power. The company wasn’t formed until 1996 and appears to sit firmly in the umbrella of RRE with the exact same stock holdings. That makes sense since the new company would have been created and funded purely by original RRE assets, so the ownership would have to remain the same or Roman would effectively be stealing from his partner. But, since Donald Woolfe didn’t specifically mention RRE Power as a separate entity, it occurred to me he possibly has no direct involvement in that company either. He may not even understand the significance of its daily activities.”

“What relevance would that information have to the current situation?”

“Possibly none,” Sam admitted. “But I’m struggling to work out who in this situation might be wearing a white hat. My inclination is to trust the information provided by Mr. Woolfe but it bothers me considerably that he failed to advise me of something so important.”

“You believe you are being played?” the Archivist asked, his eyes twinkling with some inner amusement.

Sam shook his head. “I _know_ I’m being played,” he said. “The real question in my head is why Woolfe is willing to target me to take down a company he has such a huge financial interest in. When I believed RRE was just a software developer, I could park that query to an extent. Sure RRE brings in a huge annual revenue but tech companies are notoriously ephemeral. Their bubbles burst all the time. His shares in RRE might be worth a fortune today but the wind could change and RRE could become bankrupt virtually overnight if a competitor brings out a game that steals all of Moondoor’s players. So from that point of view, I suppose he has nothing to lose.

“But a POWER company is a beast of a different color, isn’t it? Owning 25% of an independent utility supplier is a whole different ballgame.”

“I would be inclined to recommend some caution, Master Winchester,” the Archivist suggested. “I believe there is a saying about ‘assumptions’. For instance, are you so sure of the _ownership_ of both RRE and RRE Power?”

“I checked before I came here. RRE Power is a separate legal entity but it is still fully owned by RRE. So the ownership of both companies is effectively the same. RRE is a fully _private_ company. It’s jointly owned by Richard Roman and Donald Woolfe, with Roman holding 75% of the shares,” Sam stated, with a shrug. “It’s pretty straightforward.”

“Is it? Are you sure of that or are you merely assuming?”

Sam frowned. “I am absolutely _certain_ that only 100 basic shares were initially created, and since the transfer of 25% of those into Woolfe’s ownership in 1991, no further transfers have been made and no further shares have been issued.”

“And, accepting those facts to be true,” the Archivist said, “Do they prove the _ownership_ of the company?”

“Yes,” Sam stated firmly.

Blake raised a sardonic eyebrow at him, looking uncomfortably like an expectant professor waiting for a dim student to finally understand an obvious point.

Sam thought furiously, trying to work out what he was missing. Then a vague, bizarre possibility of what the Archivist was _not_ saying popped into his forebrain. “No,” he breathed. “It wouldn’t make any sense. That can’t be right. I can vaguely see why Roman _might_ possibly do it but I definitely can’t see any reason why Donald Woolfe would.”

“Would it be necessary for Woolfe to even _know_ in the hypothetical event that Roman chose to do so?” the Archivist asked.

“Not if it was only relating to his own 75%, I suppose. Private companies have no regulatory requirement to disclose those kinds of transactions so even one member of a joint-partnership would have no_ legal_ obligation to reveal the disposal of their own shares to the other.”

“I am comforted that you were paying attention to at least _that_ much when you studied this area of law,” Blake smirked.

“It is _possible_, that the ownership of RRE does not reside in the hands of either man,” Sam admitted slowly. “Bearer instruments for any number of the 100 original shares may have been raised and transferred into the safekeeping of a nominated off-shore company for the benefit of an anonymous third party.”

“And what would that mean, in real terms, if, for instance, Roman’s 75% had been handled in such a fashion?” Blake asked.

“Anybody physically holding the bearer instruments would be the _owner_ of the controlling shares of RRE.”

“And who could legally take physical possession of those bearer instruments?” the Archivist demanded.

“Only an officer of the company already named in the documentation originally supplied to that off-shore holding company. But why on earth would Richard Roman transfer ownership of his company to someone else?”

“Who says that he has?”

“But you said…”

“I merely pointed out the fallacy of your assumptions by presenting a perfectly valid alternative scenario,” the Archivist replied, then smiled serenely.

“_When_ did he do it?”

_“If_ he did it, the timing of the event _would_ be a critical factor to consider,” the Archivist allowed. “But since the scenario is purely hypothetical, I believe we have flogged this particular horse to its conclusion.”

He steepled his fingers and held them against his pursed lips in clear indication the subject was closed.

…

Despite logging into Moondoor later than he’d arranged, Jimmy was the first to arrive at The Roadhouse and was on his second cup of coffee already with still no sign of the others. If not for Ellen’s reassurances to the contrary, he would have assumed the others had already come and gone.

Which might not have been such a bad thing, really, considering how discombobulated he was feeling.

He’d been seriously tempted not to log in again at all until he had the results from the initial blood test. But then he’d decided it didn’t really matter in the short term anyway, did it? If he was suffering from auditory hallucinations and the seeming improvement in his physical health was just imaginary, it didn’t really change anything about the commitment he’d made to help Dean, Ash and Charlie.

But, if the blood tests came back positive, if Castiel was real and the healing was real, well… that changed _everything_, didn’t it?

Not just for himself, but for everyone.

Because if it was really true, if Richard Roman had somehow stumbled onto the answer of how to create computer programs capable of entering and healing real-life human beings, then Moondoor wasn’t just a _game_. It was potentially the literal fountain of life.

The concept alone was breath-taking. The prospect of a world in which almost all diseases could be eradicated, almost all injuries could be healed. Most lives could be prolonged almost indefinitely. And, yes, Jimmy could see that a lot of people might find ethical or religious reasons to resist the idea of sharing their consciousness with an artificial intelligence. Many people might find the idea too distasteful or terrifying to contemplate. Many might equate the V.I.’s as being technological versions of the monsters from old B-movies. Alien body snatchers. Many might find _that_ price one too high to pay.

But, speaking from his own experience, Jimmy was sure that _more _people would greedily grasp onto _any_ chance of a cure with both hands, regardless of the form in which that cure arrived.

In which case, Dean wasn’t just being tasked with trying to save the players of the game. His success or failure might change the course of history for the entire human race.

And, as though thinking his name had been enough to summon him, Dean took that moment to enter The Roadhouse.

Dean, who spotted him and paused for a moment, his mouth spreading into a smile so bright it almost blinded him. Jimmy felt his heartbeat quicken in response, found his own lips curving of their own volition into an answering smile.

“Hey,” Dean said, swiping a hand over the back of his neck nervously. “Sorry we kept you waiting. Hope you haven’t been here too long.”

“It’s fine,” he reassured him, and it wasn’t a lie. Whatever lingering traces of resentment he might have been feeling about being kept waiting so long had been completely swept away by nothing more than Dean’s smile.

Jimmy was pretty sure he now understood the previously elusive definition of twitter-patted. Certainly, he found it far harder to care about what was possibly happening to his real-life body whenever he was basking in the warmth of Dean’s presence.

This was probably just as well considering what Dean and Ash proceeded to tell him and Charlie as soon as the four of them were seated around the table together. Especially when Charlie’s first reaction was to turn to himself and ask, “So do _you_ hear Castiel talking to you outside the game?”

Jimmy looked awkwardly at the expectant looks of all three of his companions, then sighed heavily. “Yes,” he admitted. “I have conversed with Castiel in the_ real _world.”

“I knew it,” Dean breathed.

“His voice outside of the game may, however, merely be proof that the tanks do, indeed, cause auditory hallucinations as your brother has suggested,” Jimmy told Dean reluctantly. He winced at the look of betrayal on Dean’s face at his comment. He _really_ would have preferred to have had the entire conversation after receiving the results of the blood test. When he would be in full possession of the facts. As it was, he had no choice except to voice his own doubts.

“But I don’t hear Loki,” Dean argued. “Since we’re both using the same tanks, shouldn’t we _both_ be experiencing voices outside of the game if the voices are a symptom of the tanks themselves?”

“I don’t believe that to be a valid argument,” Jimmy said apologetically. “Having different symptoms is not in itself proof that similar damage isn’t occurring. We may simply be manifesting the same damage in different ways.”

“But the mirroring of the koi pond incident, if it really happened, would definitely suggest your mother’s perception of Moondoor as acting like a braneworld has real validity,” Charlie pointed out. “I think verifying _that_ incident would add plausibility to the rest. String theory definitely supports the braneworld concept. For all we know, everything else that seems improbable about what’s going on here is _also_ mathematically possible.”

“What the hell do you mean by ‘if it happened’?” Dean snarled.

“I’m sorry,” she said, with an apologetic shrug, “but if this is a question of whether your own perceptions of what’s happening are real, how can we know whether your memory of the event is accurate?”

“Because I was there too,” Jimmy interrupted, a huge smile of relief on his own face as he realized there _was _proof. “That was the incident when we first met. Dean is correct. There were a koi pond and a volcano. And he did, indeed, look like a Panda.”

“Um, not being rude,” Ash said, “but as a Gen 9 tank user yourself, are you even a reliable witness?”

Unexpectedly, it was Charlie who jumped to his defense. “It couldn’t work like that. Dean and Jimmy _could_ both be suffering mental damage, could both be suffering from hallucinations _but_ as strangers meeting for the first time, the idea they could immediately share the _same_ hallucination is stretching credibility too far. And if _that_ incident really happened, really mirrored an event happening to Sam in the same location, at exactly the same time, I think we’d be idiots to dismiss all the other improbable events as being impossible too.”

“Speaking of shared hallucinations,” Dean said. “Do me a favor, Jimmy, and tell me Ellen’s player level.”

Jimmy blinked at him in confusion. “She doesn’t have a _player_ level, Dean. She only has a character level.”

“Why?” Dean demanded.

Jimmy wasn’t sure where Dean was going with his odd line of questioning but shrugged and answered regardless. “Because NPC’s, by definition, aren’t _players.”_

Charlie and Ash gaped at him in astonishment.

Dean just looked smug.

“Ellen’s an NPC?” Charlie demanded incredulously.

“Didn’t you know?” Jimmy asked, with a puzzled frown.

“It’s hard to tell from interacting with her,” Dean said, “because she’s seeded with a V.I. but yes she's an NPC. I know she reads like a player to both you and Ash. But not to me and, clearly, not to Jimmy either.”

“It could be you two who are mistaken,” Ash pointed out, still playing devil’s advocate.

“It is more probable we simply see her more clearly because of our S.I’s,” Jimmy replied. “And, again, it would be highly unlikely our perception, reached individually and independently, could be interpreted as a shared hallucination.”

“I agree,” Charlie said. “Quite the opposite. The fact your perception meshes actually adds credence to the idea your tanks are providing you both with genuine information. It makes me even more inclined to believe the rest of it.”

“Then you think it’s possible that Cain, a virtual intelligence, has genuinely taken over Richard Roman and is the reason Amara has been set free?” Dean demanded.

“What does Loki think?” she countered, with no suggestion of mockery in her voice.

Dean’s mouth twisted unhappily. “He doesn’t believe it’s possible. He insists Cain could only take control of Roman’s vessel with permission. He says it would be _theoretically_ possible for a V.I. to take control of a host body but that it would be impossible without specific invitation because he, and the other V.I.’s, have been coded with strict unbreakable protocols to prevent any hostile action against their hosts.”

“Castiel agrees,” Jimmy said, as he checked his S.I. “He says Richard Roman used Asimov’s Laws of Robotics when he created Chuck, so all of Chuck’s ‘children’ also follow the same protocols. Therefore, unless the Arch Angels inhabiting the original Knights were programmed without the requirement to obey the same laws, he doesn’t believe the scenario is possible.”

“Well they _were_ programmed differently, weren’t they?” Ash reminded them all. “They were programmed by humans rather than by Chuck. Though, since Roman thought to put the Laws in place for Chuck, I can’t see he would have omitted them from the Knights. Unfortunately, there’s no one left alive to ask except Roman himself.”

“So it’s a big unknown. It might be Cain alone or it might be Cain and Roman acting together. But we’re all going to work on the basis that, either way, Cain is a real V.I. rather than a figment of Roman’s imagination or some form of split-personality as Sam maintains?” Dean checked.

Ash and Charlie nodded their agreement. Jimmy, however, was still doubtful. Not so much because he truly still doubted Castiel’s reality but because he still wasn’t ready to discuss the possibility of Castiel’s ability to heal his physical body. It was too much. Too huge. It was _definitely_ too much responsibility to lay on Dean’s shoulders without firm evidence.

“Perhaps the only relevant new information Sam has imparted is the confirmation that the original Knights died because they were killed in-game,” he suggested cautiously.

“I don’t think it changes anything,” Charlie announced.

“Really?” Dean asked incredulously. “You did hear the part about the Knights actually ‘dying’ if I kill them in-game.”

“Make your mind up. Are the inhabitants of Moondoor ‘real’ or not?” she demanded.

“I believe _many_ of them are,” Dean admitted.

“So if you kill _them_ what’s the difference?”

“Huh?”

“Take Meg for example. She’s a bitch. I’m all for ganking her. But is she _real_ ?”

“Totally different scenario,” Dean countered. “She’s a monster-class. Kill her and she doesn’t ‘die’, she ends up in Purgatory and then respawns. She’s effectively immortal.”

“Sure,” Charlie agreed easily. “So let’s move on to… um… Balthazar, is it?”

“You mean Castiel’s angel buddy seeded inside Crowley?” Dean checked.

“That’s the one,” Charlie agreed. “So you kill Crowley when he’s on his last life and you presumably kill both of them, right?”

“Right.”

“And Balthy doesn’t respawn. He’s just gone. Poof. All over?”

“I think so.”

“So what’s the difference? Why are you worried about killing the asshole who plays Crowley but you don’t give a shit about Balthazar?”

“Jesus,” Dean said, his eyes wide with shock. “I hadn’t even thought about _that.”_

“Of course you hadn’t,” Charlie said, her expression surprisingly kind. “Why would you? But now you’re all OMG I’m going to be murdering BOTH of them, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah…” Dean muttered.

“Because you’re a good guy,” she said, with a careless shrug. “It’s how you roll. And, yeah, sure, it _should_ bother you if we're prepared to accept the V.I.’s as being ‘people’. But the problem with a situation like this is it's going to make your mind explode if you try to work out all the different ramifications here. So dial it back and look at it in a different way. What happens if you simply don’t log back into Moondoor. Does Crowley survive? Does Balthazar?”

“Um,” Dean mumbled, shrugging helplessly.

“Only if Crowley wins the First Blade by killing all the others and manages to defeat Amara,” Ash interrupted.

“And if it isn’t Crowley, it’s going to be one of the other Knights who wins,” Charlie continued, “or maybe two of them get to Rank 5 and neither of them becomes the overall winner and Amara survives and destroys everything and then ALL of the Knights die, plus anyone else playing in Moondoor at the time, and the only person left standing is YOU, Dean, because you logged out. Lucky old you.”

“Brutal,” Dean snarled.

“But true,” she said. “The thing is, you aren’t causing all of this. You aren’t responsible for it. And it’s happening whether you participate or not. Look at it THAT way and you aren’t killing anyone, are you? Because unless they decide to stop playing, they’re all dead anyway.”

“So Sam’s right, isn’t he?” Dean demanded. “The only way to handle this situation is to take RRE down and stop people from being able to play at all.”

“Well, yes, as long as you don’t mind murdering all the residents of Moondoor to do it,” she agreed, smiling at him beatifically.

“My head hurts,” Dean groaned. “How the hell am I supposed to decide what to do?”

“Unless Sam_ is_ right that we’re all just imagining that the V.I.’s are alive,” Ash pointed out, “Dean and Jimmy have got an excuse, if the tank is fucking with their heads, but where’s OUR excuse? It’s not like you or I can categorically state we have proof, is it Charlie?”

“True,” Charlie agreed, with an apologetic grimace towards Dean. “Our assumptions have been totally skewed by what Dean and Jimmy have said about their interactions with their S.I.’s and both Dean and Jimmy are using the Gen 9 tanks. But, that having been said, I’m a programmer and I know what in-game NPC’s should act like and the behaviors of characters like Meg and Castiel and Ellen are well beyond any level of coding that I’m aware of. Then there’s the Koi incident which is as weird as fuck in anyone’s book. Add that to the fact RRE tried to kill me and I’m tending to go with my gut instinct on this one. Sure, Dean might be insane, sorry Dean, but I’m still going to hitch my wagon to his regardless until I have proof one way or the other.”

“Hang on,” Ash interrupted. “I just had another thought. What about Asimov’s Laws? How can Loki and Castiel still be willing or even _able_ to help us if they know this might lead to the genuine death of human beings?”

“Loki says the Zeroth Law trumps the First Law,” Dean explained grimly.

“Castiel agrees,” Jimmy concurred.

“They really believe this is that important?” Ash whistled, his eyes huge with shock.

And Jimmy knew he had to say _something. _But what if he was wrong? If he told them what he _thought _Castiel and the other Angels were capable of doing, he’d remove Dean’s options altogether. What if telling him about the healing caused Dean to decide to kill the human players to save the virtual intelligences but then the blood tests came back negative?

_“_I…um…I may have a way to offer proof to you not only that the V.I.’s are real but that there is a significant justification for them to apply the Zeroth Law to this situation. However, I require a further 24 hours before I can provide it.”

“What proof?” Charlie demanded.

He flinched from the expectant look on her face. “I would prefer to continue this conversation tomorrow,” he said, apologetically but firmly.

“But…” she began.

“Drop it,” Dean barked, glowering at Charlie repressively. “The man says he needs some time, so give him some time. None of this matters immediately, does it? Until I face a Knight with only one remaining game life, I can’t actually _kill_ them anyway. We have time to figure this out, guys.”

“Thank you,” Jimmy told him sincerely.

“I’m going to go see whether Ellen has a quest for us then,” Charlie said. “No point sitting around with our thumbs up our asses in the meantime.”

“I’ll come with,” Ash agreed easily, and the two of them rose and went to the Bar counter to speak to Ellen.

“Twenty-four hours,” Dean replied quietly, once they had left. “Then I want an answer.”

“You said a man was entitled to his secrets,” Jimmy reminded him.

“You are,” Dean agreed. “But this is bigger than you. Bigger than all of us. I can’t make you trust me. I can only hope you will. But if you can’t, if you won’t…” He paused and winced a smile in Jimmy’s direction. “If you decide tomorrow you still don’t want to really be a part of this with us, don’t want to trust us, well, don’t log in at all.”

Jimmy swallowed heavily. “I understand,” he said.

Dean nodded at him, his normally bright eyes dimmed with evident sadness. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Don’t be,” Jimmy said. “Because I have every intention of logging in tomorrow, Dean. I make you a solemn promise.”

Dean stared at him for a long moment, seeming to measure him with his eyes, and then whatever he saw in Jimmy’s expression seemed to reassure him. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We drop the subject until tomorrow.” He offered Jimmy a now genuine smile. “Let’s go see what Ellen’s got to say.”

…

“I am far too busy to attend you so I must leave you to do your research alone. Don’t lose yourself in here, Master Winchester,” the Archivist said, his eyes bright with good humor. “It’s far too easy to let time slip away from you completely in a place like this. Oh, and I’d most strongly suggest you restrict your perusals to the specific scope of the investigation that you outlined. Don’t be tempted to meander into areas that do not concern you. It would be highly inadvisable. Curiosity so rarely works out for cats, does it?”

Sam waited until Blake unlocked the door for him and had walked away completely out of sight down the long gloomily lit corridor leading back to the front desk, before muttering under his breath, “I’m not a cat.”

Even so, he could have sworn he heard a distant rumble of low laughter in response.

Allowed, finally, to enter the vault belonging to RRE, Sam soon discovered Donald Woolfe had been totally correct about the location of the only surviving prototype immersion tanks. They, along with a myriad of old computers, monitors, and the corpses of hulking tape-drive servers spewing spilled entrails of wire and pipe, filled one side of the huge room like a haunting Stonehenge that spoke of long-abandoned worship to the God of Tech.

The immersion tanks called to him as they sat there like abandoned Egyptian sarcophagi, their dark surfaces covered with a thin sheen of dust. Like the tombs of dead kings discovered buried under hot desert sands, the coffin-shaped boxes whispered the promise of lost treasure and secrets of mysteries untold within their dusty husks.

Not enough dust, really, to evidence fifteen years of neglect but, then again, the archive was a closed environment so perhaps it was more surprising there was any dust at all.

The hulking, brooding blackness of the immersion tanks was only otherwise interrupted by pale orange stand-by lights blinking slowly at the base of their control panels.

So they were still plugged in and powered-up, despite being long abandoned.

Which, now he realized the fact, was probably the reason the room wasn’t totally silent. The low whispering hum that throbbed throughout the room, just on the furthest periphery of his auditory range, wasn’t a distant echo of the archive’s environmental control system. It was the tanks themselves, humming an almost imperceptible siren-call of standby power.

Drawn inexorably towards the two computer monitors that sat equally black and seemingly completely dead on a table directly behind the tanks, Sam flicked the hibernate switch on the closest screen and the monitor sprang to life, belying his assumption it was ‘off’ by displaying a generic screensaver welcoming him to Moondoor and asking him ‘Log in: Y/N’

Sam wondered, idly, how the game worked.

Since he didn’t have an account, didn’t have an avatar, what would happen if he climbed inside the tank and activated the log-in command?

Presumably nothing, except himself getting covered in slime.

It was a stupid idea, anyway.

He didn’t even want to play the damned game.

So he returned to the other side of the room and began ruffling through the filing cabinets, flicking from one file to the next in search of a document, _any_ document, that would help his cause.

And, behind him, the tanks continued their brooding slumber. The low whispering throb of their near dormant power hissing a steady pulsing chant that sounded oddly like “Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam….”

…


	51. Not in Kansas anymore.

“Exactly how stupid do I look?” Dean demanded, his brows knitted with annoyance.

Ellen’s mouth twitched into a smirk. “Do you seriously want an answer to that?” she asked sweetly.

Ash snickered until Charlie dug an elbow into his ribs.

“I believe Dean is correct that you are attempting to deceive us,” Jimmy interjected, politely but firmly. “None of these quests would appear to fall under the normal auspices of the Hunter Guild. Add to that the fact that no Guild realm ports are available for our use, and one might assume that _none_ of these quests originate from the Guild Master.”

Ellen’s cheeks flushed and she looked momentarily embarrassed at being caught out, but then she firmed her posture and fixed her expression into one of angry defiance. “So? And? That’s the problem with you damned immigrants. You only care about points and prizes. None of you care about any of us locals.”

“That’s where you’re totally wrong,” Dean replied, with a sorrowful shake of his head. “I don’t give a damn whether or not these are ‘Guild’ quests. Innocent people are getting killed and stopping that kind of shit is the business we’re in,” he announced firmly. “But I don’t like it when people lie to me or try to play me like this, okay?”

Ellen looked even more suspicious, rather than convinced. She narrowed her eyes as she glared at him as though searching for some visible evidence of his bullshit.

“We all know you’re an NPC,” Charlie interrupted quietly.

Ellen startled, her arm automatically reaching below the bar counter for a weapon.

“And it doesn’t matter to us,” Ash added hurriedly. “Dean has known since the first moment he laid eyes on you and that hasn’t stopped us doing every quest you have asked of us, has it?”

“Because you need to level up,” she spat, her comment aimed directly at Dean. “Don’t try pretending it’s all been altruistic, boy.”

But her hand returned to the counter, weaponless, so they all relaxed a little.

“Of course I need to level up,” Dean agreed, with an easy smile. “But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, are they? I can win just as much XP doing a quest for you as doing an authorized Quest for Bobby Singer.”

“Well, not really,” Jimmy pointed out. “The XP will most probably be lower for a non-Guild quest since you won’t win any Guild bonuses and you are less likely to come against other Player characters as foes.”

“Not helping,” Charlie muttered repressively.

Jimmy flushed and fell silent.

“No, Jimmy’s right,” Dean said.

“If unnecessarily pedantic,” Ash muttered.

Jimmy’s flush deepened.

“But it doesn’t matter,” Dean continued, glaring at Ash repressively, “because my point remains the same. I win _enough_ XP either way, so you can just be honest with us, Ellen. If we can help out, we will.”

Ellen continued to glare for a moment, unconvinced, but then she sighed deeply and dropped her posture into one of defeated exhaustion. “Okay,” she agreed. “Here’s the situation. A friend of mine, Donatello, who lives in Hope Springs, says a weird giant fog descended over the town on Monday and all the inhabitants, except Donny, turned into Rabids within a few hours.”

“What’s a Rabid?” Dean asked.

“Like a zombie, kinda, but they have protruding black veins and although they aggressively attack and infect other characters, they aren’t mindless,” Ash replied. “On the plus side, they’re pretty easy to kill but the downside is they don’t have to bite you to infect. Just a splash of their blood on your skin and you’re history, so knives and swords aren’t the best weapons to hit them with.”

"Well that's a bit of a bummer, all things considered," Dean replied.

“It's too late, anyway. Rapids have a really short shelf-life,” Charlie said, her expression sorrowful. “The infection spreads at a varying rate but always kills the infected within a few hours. So if this happened on Monday, everyone in Hope Springs is already long dead.”

“I know,” Ellen said sadly. “But Donny says the fog is slowly traveling south, and it apparently reached the town of Lewis a couple of hours ago. Lewis has over two hundred inhabitants.”

“And there might still be time to save most of the people?” Dean asked, grasping her point immediately.

“I hope so,” Ellen agreed, “but if you go to Lewis first, which you need to do because of the short ‘shelf-life’ of the disease, it will probably be too late for you to then save the residents of Edmond.”

“That’s the tiny hamlet where you said a _player_ arrived a few hours ago and started slaughtering the residents indiscriminately as though all they wanted was to gain XP?” Dean double-checked.

Ellen nodded.

“Which definitely sounds more like a possible Knight sighting,” Jimmy reminded him.

“It does,” Dean agreed, “but if so, he or she has probably already killed most or all of the residents. We’re probably definitely too late for Edmond, but there’s still time to save Hope Springs.”

“The Knight in Edmond is highly unlikely to have access to a realm port though,” Charlie reminded him. “He or she will be traveling on foot. If we go straight there, we could probably catch them and at least trim _one_ of their lives. Plus we get to find out what their avatar looks like. That could make a huge difference later on.”

“We go to Edmond _after_ Hope Springs,” Dean decided. “We should prioritize a chance to save people over the chance to go after the Knight. The Knight’s got 10 lives to lose but the inhabitants of Hope Spring don’t. They aren’t monsters. They probably aren’t going to respawn.”

“I apologize for doubting you,” Ellen said, smiling at Dean in approval of his decision.

Dean just nodded at her, then asked, “So we need to treat the Rabids as cursed villagers, I guess. What’s the cure? Any of you know?”

“Holy fire or holy oil,” Jimmy replied. “According to Castiel,” he added, at their looks of surprise that he knew the answer.

“Oooh, question,” Charlie said. “Is Donatello a seeded NPC too?”

“Yes. Why does it matter?” Ellen asked suspiciously.

“I’m just wondering how come he is immune,” she said. “If the cure is holy oil and holy fire, that would suggest that the Rabids are vulnerable to anything directly connected to _Chuck_. So I guess they would be unable to infect anyone hosting an angel.” 

Dean blinked uncertainly. “Are _all_ V.I.’s defined as ‘angels’?” he queried.

“Fundamentally,” Loki agreed. “Not what I would _call_ angels really, but loosely, yeah, they still qualify. I doubt the V.I.s inside the NPC’s are of any significant rank or power but even if they’re nothing more than amoebas with wings, they’re still classed as Chuck’s children so, yeah, they’re still a _kind_ of ‘angel’, I guess.”

Dean repeated Loki’s comment to the others.

“Cool,” Ash said. “Then I have a different suggestion. Let's split up. You and Jimmy go to Hope Springs, whilst me and Charlie go to Edmond.”

“That would be a wise course of action,” Jimmy agreed. “Since Dean and I should theoretically be immune from the Rabid disease, as we host Angelic beings, but you and Charlie do not.”

“We can handle a Knight by ourselves, easily enough,” Charlie pointed out, clearly in favor of Ash's idea. “They’re probably only level 15. And even if they’ve leveled up enough to hit level 50, they’re still going to be considerably weaker than Ash.”

Dean nodded his agreement. “But watch out for demons,” he reminded them.

“Worst they can do is kill us,” Charlie shrugged carelessly.

Dean accepted that with his own shrug, then turned to Jimmy. “Those realm ports still on offer, bud?”

“Of course,” Jimmy agreed, accessing his S.I. and sending Dean half of the ports he had in his inventory.

“Woah,” Dean exclaimed as they landed. “I was only asking for a couple.”

Jimmy shrugged. “I thought our motto was supposed to be ‘All for one and one for all’.”

Dean clasped a friendly arm over his shoulder as they walked out of The Roadhouse, “You do know the Three Musketeers thing was just a joke, right?”

…

Magnus, still smarting over the email from ‘Johnny’, decided he wasn’t in the mood to deal with any more shit from ‘Lilith’ whether his damned system interface wanted to work with him or not.

He was already two lives down and this was only his third day logging into Moondoor itself, rather than the Purgatory shit-hole he had been stuck inside all the previous week. Whatever happened, he had no intention of losing a _third_ life to the little bitch.

She was out of options now anyway, as far as he could tell.

The first time she had surprised him completely (something he totally blamed his S.I. for since it had failed to offer him the information that she was a level 15 _player _until her dagger was already planted inside his ribcage) because it would never have even occurred to him that a Knight would choose to inhabit the avatar of a small girl.

Neither had it occurred to him that two Knights might have emerged from Purgatory on the same day in _exactly _the same place.

The second time, since he now knew what she looked like, he had taken advantage of the fact that she, like himself, had no access to realm ports so would have inevitably logged back into the same location as she had been when she exited the game on Monday.

She had been smart enough to leave the village she had killed him in but, trapped within the guise of a little girl, she hadn’t traveled far. On Tuesday, Magnus had located her in an NPC town called New Harmony, ten miles to the west of their original point of arrival. It had only taken a few hours to track her location down, because he had told every NPC he met that he was looking for his missing beloved ‘daughter’ and they had all helpfully recounted their sightings of the pretty little blonde ‘cherub’.

By mid-day, he had triangulated three of those sightings and closed in on her.

That time it was _he_ who buried his dagger in an unsuspecting rib-cage and it was Lilith who had died.

Unfortunately, Magnus had immediately discovered that stabbing a tiny child to death in the middle of an NPC village in front of several dozen witnesses was liable to get someone lynched.

Which was the _second_ and most grievous complaint he had made about his system interface to the indifferent ‘Johnny’.

He should have been able to simply log-out of the game to escape the townsfolk entirely. It shouldn’t have been possible at all for him to be captured, beaten up, tried, found guilty and actually hanged in the town square. The whole process (although admittedly it took barely less than an hour) could have been avoided completely had his glitchy system interface not chosen that particular hour to switch off completely, removing all of his options _including _the most fundamental one of _Log Out Y/N._

To be honest, _that_ particular glitch was preying on his mind.

What if it happened again? What if he got trapped within the game for a longer period and suffered an even more painful death? He was already finding the reality of being a ‘Knight of Hell’ was proving to be a lot less entertaining than he’d initially anticipated. If playing the game continued to be so frustrating and _painful_, Magnus was tempted to tell RRE to shove their job where the sun didn’t shine.

In the meantime, however, he had a perfect solution.

Kill all the townsfolk _before_ going after his pint-sized nemesis.

And, all the XP he would earn by doing so would just be gravy.

…

This was _exactly_ the kind of stupid, hare-brained, ill-considered and reckless act that Dean excelled at doing, Sam decided.

But, despite the harshness of the thought itself, Sam himself was feeling remarkably sanguine about the fact that after several hours of leafing through filing cabinets and finding absolutely nothing of interest, the siren call of the abandoned tanks had proven too much to ignore.

The endless whispers of “Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam…” had coiled through his head like sneaking, snaking fingers that had fluttered through his thoughts like butterflies, just like his own fingers were ruffling through the files, and somehow they had found purchase inside his head, burying the hooks of curiosity deep inside his own mind.

Surely just _one_ use of the tank couldn’t do any neurological damage, the whispering assured him, swirling through his mind like the somnolent hum of fluttering insects on a sunny day.

Only a fool would try to destroy something he hadn’t even attempted to first understand, the whispering added and he nodded a drowsy agreement of the wisdom of those words.

Was the air getting a bit thin in the vault?

Was that why he felt light-headed?

So tired?

The air is lovely in Moondoor, the whispers said. So clear, so fine, so lovely.

Besides, he considered slowly, lethargically, he wasn’t going to be sharing his generic avatar with a virtual intelligence like the Knights did so surely there couldn’t be any danger at all.

And the air is SO lovely in Moondoor.

It would just be a quick trip in and out, to experience Moondoor for himself just _once_ to be in a position to fully understand the phenomenon he was attempting to destroy. It was a necessary step in his process of thoroughly researching the issue, wasn’t it?

Of course, it was, the whispering reassured in its comforting, hypnotic voice.

And you’re tired, anyway, aren’t you, it added softly, convincingly.

So tired.

It was time perhaps to lie down for a while, for a brief while, in the comfortable gel that sparkled a welcome inside the now open tank.

When did he open the tank?

He couldn’t remember.

It didn’t seem important.

And yes, he _was_ feeling tired.

Exhausted, even.

The gel _did_ seem inviting to him because he was _so tired_ and the air felt thin in the vault, despite the controlled environment, almost as though the oxygen level had been depleted to a dangerous level and that meant he was in danger and that meant he needed to act, to move, to…

to…

to…

But he was sooooo tired.

To what??? He wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem important, though, as his thoughts stretched like taffy until whatever elusive idea he had been chasing seemed as distant and ephemeral as a cloud.

Moondoor has clouds, the whispers told him. Lovely clouds. Lovely air. So much lovely air.

That was it.

He remembered now.

He wanted to lie down.

Lie down in the gel. In the tank. Yes. That was it. To lie down in the tank. Like the whispering voices were saying he should.

He still had a brief moment of doubt, of sanity perhaps breaking through the haze, as he peeled off his clothes, stepped into the tank and fiddled awkwardly with attaching the mask of the breathing tube to his face. What if he couldn’t open it again from the inside? What if he became trapped inside the thing until he withered into a mummy and the tank truly became a sarcophagus?

But, the hypnotic whisper assured him smoothly, the Archivist knew he was in this room. If Sam didn’t emerge then, after a maximum of a few more hours, Blake would surely come and find him. And, yeah, sure that would be embarrassing but he could live with a red face if that was the _only_ cost of being discovered taking an illicit trip to the virtual world he was determined to destroy.

Soothed, convinced, exhausted, Sam lay down in the gel and took a deep gulp of air from the breathing tube.

As the tank closed over his head, disturbingly similar to the sensation of a coffin lid being lowered, as the oxygen refilled his depleted lungs, Sam felt a sudden shiver of dread, one violent enough to fracture his haze of contentment enough that he reached in sudden panic for the switch that would open the tank again for him to climb out. But then a screen popped up in front of his eyes, its glow easing the total, terrifying darkness as white typed words scrolled across its surface.

… Enter virtual world: Y/N?

Hmmm, he huffed to himself, his alarm fading again as the ‘normalcy’ of the communication eased his fear and returned him to a state of sleepy indolence. He’d been expecting a log-in screen. One that would offer him the ability to create an account.

Maybe that one came up next though, he mused idly.

It didn’t seem important.

He slowly, lazily, raised his hand through the gel of the tank and pressed his finger-tips against the glowing Y.

Several things happened at once.

The screen went dim, he heard the dull roar of the tank powering up, he felt a strange, but not unpleasant, sensation of the gel surrounding him heating up and becoming almost electrically charged so that it pulsed and tingled softly against his bare flesh. Then he had a mental sensation like falling off a cliff, a hot, black rush of sensation through his brain that caused him to nearly pass out.

And then he blinked furiously as his eyes burned with the heat of a thousand suns as he ‘woke’ to find himself standing in an arid, alien landscape with nothing in sight except black volcanic rock and a scarlet, angry sky.

Black cumulonimbus clouds roiled across the fire-red sky, clashing together into a huge, furious cauliflower with blood-red flashes of lightning spearing through its surfaces and they spoke with the roaring howl of a thousand thunderclaps, a symphony so discordant that its furious sound shook the ground beneath his feet.

Sam staggered, barely able to keep upright as the black rocks splintered and fractured under the assault of the deafening cacophony.

And his somnolent haze was abruptly erased as he woke up _completely_.

“Where the fuck am I?” he demanded.

Because, wherever he was, he was certain that it sure as hell wasn’t Moondoor.


	52. The Reaper

“So where do we find Holy Oil?” Dean mused aloud, as they stood outside The Roadhouse. “Is it like Holy Water? Do we need to go to one of Chuck’s temples to find it?”

“It’s rare and valuable,” Charlie replied. “Only available in-game as prizes for some really high-end magic Quests. Fortunately, we happen to know a High-Ranking Mage who _probably_ has a stash in his inventory.”

She looked significantly at Ash.

Who shrugged helplessly, mouthing “Who, me?”

Then winked at his companions and grinned smugly.

“Cool,” Dean breathed. “You’re the best, man,” he said, as Ash produced two fat vials with a dramatic flourish and handed them over.

“Try not to use them _both_ though,” Ash warned. “I don’t have many more, they were a bastard to win, and who knows when else we’ll need the stuff before this gig is over.”

Dean flushed and rubbed the back of his need awkwardly. “In case I haven’t said it before, I can’t… um… well, I can’t say how much I appreciate all of you helping me like this. It’s… um… above and beyond, so thanks, guys.”

“Hey,” Charlie said, with an easy smile, “We’re all in this together, Dean. You might be ‘Dean The Righteous’ but we all have an equal stake in this, okay? We’re all Team Dean, right guys?”

Ash nodded enthusiastically.

After a slight pause, Jimmy nodded his own firm agreement.

Dean raised his eyebrows questioningly at the blue-eyed man. “24 hours?” he reminded him cautiously.

“24 hours,” Jimmy murmured in agreement, meeting Dean’s gaze steadily.

Dean nodded his acceptance and smiled. “Let’s go then.”

…

The black clouds spun and swirled overhead, like a gathering tornado, before morphing together to form a vast shape not unlike a face.

If faces were the size of skyscrapers.

And, then, inside that ‘face’, two scarlet suns pierced the clouds to form eyes, and a dark slash of a cirrus cloud formed a ‘mouth’.

Which opened.

And spoke in a voice so thunderously loud that Sam startled, lost his footing and landed awkwardly, squashing his tail beneath him.

“I AM THE REAPER. THE DEVOURER OF WORLDS,” the cloud mouth roared.

Flinching as the noise caused the pressure inside his inner ears to ‘pop’, Sam’s expression twisted into disbelief even as he belatedly remembered the fact the tank’s internal screen had differed from the one on the monitor. 

His nose twitched, his eyes widened until they were impossibly large and his whiskers bristled with alarm.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I’ve landed in fucking ‘Afterlife’.”

Then he narrowed his eyes in confused annoyance at the sound of his own voice.

“Why the fuck do I sound like Inigo Montoya?”

….

“There’s no-one here,” Ash said, looking around the deserted village square.

“Let’s check the houses,” Charlie suggested, not waiting for his response before bouncing up to one of the quaintly hobbit-like structures and pushing open its closed, round door.

Finding it empty, she moved to the next, and then the next.

Ash crossed the square to where a larger structure displayed the sign of an Inn. It only took him a moment to confirm that the Inn, too, was deserted.

In the distance, surrounded by fields that seemed equally empty of villagers, there was a large hay barn.

Silently, they mutually agreed it was the most logical place to check next.

“How many people used to live here?” Charlie asked sadly, since it was obvious that they had definitely arrived too late. Because this was Moondoor, not the material world, there were no corpses to evidence a slaughter.

Just absences remained after NPC’s died. They simply blinked out of existence and were reabsorbed into the metadata of the digital world.

Still, if even a single survivor could be located in Edmond, that person might be able to offer a clue as to the direction the Knight had gone after the slaughter.

“Oh my god,” Charlie moaned, as she and Ash entered the huge barn. “I’m going to be sick.”

Ash was too busy gagging himself to answer.

“But… but… why are they still here? Why haven’t they disappeared?” she continued, unable to look directly at the remaining villagers and yet, unable to tear her view away completely.

Ash finished spewing half-digested coffee, spat several times to clear the taste of vomit out of his mouth, then finally answered. “Because they’re not dead yet,” he said, grimly.

As though in confirmation, one of the ‘bodies’ hanging from the rafters of the barn gave a faint, rattling gasp and then dissolved until all that was left was an empty piece of rope swinging from an overhead beam.

“Stand back,” Ash snapped, then raised his hands to summon an arc of fire between them. He then thrust his arms forward and the flames burst forward to envelop the other victims in a searing heat that instantaneously immolated them.

In less than a second, nothing remained but a dozen charred ropes.

“I couldn’t have saved them,” he muttered. “But I could at least stop them suffering.”

Charlie burst into noisy tears.

“I’m sorry,” Ash said.

“Not as sorry as that fucker is going to be when we find him,” Charlie snarled, wiping furiously at the tears and snot streaming down her face. “He tortured them. For _hours._”

“The Knight could be a woman,” Ash reminded her.

Charlie shook her head. “Nope, it’s a man. A sick fuck of a man. A woman couldn’t have done _that_.”

Under different circumstances, Ash would have given her some shit for making a sexist assumption like that.

But, he didn’t because he agreed.

Not because he thought a woman incapable of that level of cruelty. Ash was pretty sure that women were just as liable to do sick shit as men were. So, yeah, a woman could have been just as psychologically capable of skinning someone alive like that.

But it would have taken one hell of a strong person to be physically able to string their live victims up on ropes and hoist them up several feet off the ground. And very tall too, to be able to torture them at that height.

So the Knight was tall.

Huge, even.

And, so, almost certainly male.

…

“HOW DARE YOU ENTER MY WORLD,” the voice rumbled, and the ground beneath Sam’s feet cracked further, splitting into deep crevices that opened up like wounds, revealing red magma that looked horribly like fresh blood.

Skipping, staggering, his head bowed against the wind pressure caused by each word from the booming overhead voice, Sam tried to scurry his way towards a crag of overhanging rocks. Then slammed to a halt as one of them splintered and fell in an avalanche that would have crushed him had he reached the faux security they had promised.

And then, unsure now which direction to flee, buffeted by the wind, seared by the spitting magma, his fur singed by sparks from flying volcanic rocks, Sam abruptly decided he had had enough.

“YOU’RE NOT REAL,” he howled back. “I WANT TO WAKE UP NOW.”

Because, he realized, none of this could possibly be real.

It was a dream.

Or a hallucination.

Caused, undoubtedly, by oxygen deprivation.

Oh god, he breathed, as he suddenly considered all the possible side-effects of hypoxia. What if he wasn’t even in the tank at all? What if he was really just lying in a stupor on the floor of the vault, his brain cells perishing as he suffered irreversible damage. He’d die if Blake didn’t find him. Or, maybe even worse, perhaps get ‘saved’ just in time to spend the rest of his life as a drooling idiot.

Or maybe he was in the tank, having crawled inside it as a result of said brain damage caused by hypoxia and now the tank was doing a number on him too? Causing this hallucination? Maybe he’d be ‘saved’ just in time to be a _hallucinating_ drooling idiot.

His heart was now hammering so loudly in panic that he could no longer hear the thunder of the roiling clouds, or the boom of its ear-shattering ‘voice’. All he could hear was the thud, thud, thud of his arteries threatening to explode as panic wrapped around him like a thick, smothering blanket and he closed his eyes tightly, praying desperately “Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up…”

“Oh, for goodness sake,” a dry voice interrupted, speaking into a sudden void of otherwise complete silence. “Could you possibly be any more of a drama queen?”

“Mr. Blake?” Sam gasped, opening his eyes in relief.

The hellish landscape was gone.

He was back in the Archive.

At least he _thought_ it must be the Archive, albeit not the room he had _apparently_ passed out in. This room was more library than storage vault. Stacks lined the walls, burdened with ancient tomes and dusty artifacts, and he himself was seated in a comfortable, deep-red, worn-leather chair.

He took a deep, cautious breath and then a deeper, more relaxed one as his breath filled easily with life-affirming oxygen.

“Did I pass out? Did you carry me out of that room into this one?” he asked the Archivist.

Mortimer Blake raised a sardonic eyebrow and gestured at his own wraith-thin frame mockingly.

Sam swallowed nervously, realizing there was no way in hell the Archivist could possibly have picked him up and carried him _anywhere._ “Then, um, how did I get here?” he asked, and gestured down at his own body pointedly.

Only to freeze in horror as he looked down at his high-topped leather boots, furry thighs and the tail that was flicking agitatedly around his legs.

And the entity wearing Mortimer Blake’s face morphed into a cloaked skeleton, with glowing red eyes, that spoke in a voice unmistakably that of the cloud (though, thankfully, much more quietly). “Mortimer believes your propensity for examining everything to the nth degree is endearing. That your need to challenge everything in front of your eyes is proof of your unusual intelligence. The mark of a bright, inquisitive mind that should be nurtured and encouraged. Personally, however, I just find you to be intensely _irritating_, Samuel Winchester.”

Sam just swallowed heavily.

“Does it ever occur to you that sometimes the reason something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck is simply that it _is_ a duck?” the skeleton asked him conversationally.

“So I really _am_ in Afterlife?” Sam asked.

“Well, I’m not a piece of undigested cheese,” the skeleton sneered.

Sam blinked rapidly. “Did you seriously just reference ‘A Christmas Carol’?”

“I’m your ‘hallucination’,” the skeleton sneered. “You tell me.”

“You definitely look like the Ghost of Christmas Future,” Sam countered.

“I do. I even have a scythe,” it replied smugly, producing one out of thin air and sweeping it in a gesture that caused several of the library books to fall off their shelves.

Sam flinched away from the flashing blade. Maybe, this was how it really _did_ feel to be inside a virtual world when lying inside a total immersion tank.

In which case, the character he was conversing with _was _real, albeit only a computer program. What was it Donald Woolfe had claimed about the Reaper? That it was such an evolved A.I. that it believed it was a ‘God’ and had locked Richard Roman out of his own creation? Yeah. That was it. Though, having experienced Afterlife for himself, Sam wasn’t sure Roman had missed much by the exclusion. This virtual world was not a fun place to be.

So this ‘Reaper’ was just a bundle of badly written code running amok in a virtual environment. Even so, it was possible the program was legitimately dangerous to someone whose consciousness was linked to it. Sam was pretty sure there was a myth that ‘dying’ in a dream meant a dreamer would die in real life. That many people thought that was the source of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Like most myths, it possibly had _some_ basis in reality.

It would probably behoove him to attempt to extract himself from this virtual world in an ‘alive’ state. Sam told himself desperately, the best (or only) way to escape was to work his way through it. Go with the flow, he told himself. Follow whatever bizarre path his subconscious was trying to lead him down and maybe, just maybe, he’d reach its conclusion and wake up before his brain dissolved into complete mush due to lack of oxygen.

Play along, Sam, he told himself.

“You’re the Reaper, huh?” he asked brightly.

The skeleton offered him a cheerless grin and nodded its head in agreement.

Then it transformed back into the form of Mortimer Blake. Though it retained hold of the scythe. “I assume we are now going to have a civilized conversation,” The Reaper said, settling in a chair and spreading his bony limbs out into a comfortable sprawl.

“So, um, what’s with _my _avatar?” Sam demanded grumpily.

“I like it,” The Reaper replied, then smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant smile.

Sam swallowed nervously, his whiskers twitching as he attempted to stay silent. It was only an avatar, after all. It wasn’t like it really mattered what he looked like in a virtual world, did it? Particularly one he didn’t even want to be inside.

Except…

Yes, it kind of did.

“Do I _have_ to look like the damned Shrek version of Puss-in-boots?” he blurted.

“I believe it suits you,” The Reaper replied, now smirking. “A little, big-eyed kittycat always curiously poking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Sniffing your way into business that doesn’t concern you. Such as this most definitely uninvited visit you have made to my world.”

“You tricked me into coming here,” Sam protested.

“I did?” The Reaper asked, raising a sardonic eyebrow. “How do you possibly reach_ that_ conclusion?”

“Donald Woolfe told me that Afterlife couldn’t be accessed by humans,” Sam argued. “That you locked everyone out. So the fact I’m here at all suggests you deliberately allowed me to arrive. And the oxygen just happened to fail in the vault? And am I not supposed to mention the fact the monitor connected to the tank clearly indicated the tank was connected to Moondoor? A more cynical person could put a case that this whole set up was a deliberate trap.”

Well, that or he’d been wrong about assuming it took more than one use of the prototype tanks to cause insanity. Still, hallucination or not Sam still had the distinct feeling he needed to let this play out for him to have any chance of waking up again.

The Reaper shrugged. “Permission does not equate to invitation, Master Winchester.”

Sam thought about that, then nodded his agreement to the precise point (if not the sentiment). Arguing with the A.I. was pointless. And possibly dangerous. So he’d let it win. “Then I apologize for my uninvited arrival and thank you for your kindness in permitting me entry regardless.”

“Very pretty. I already knew you had a smooth tongue. Don’t imagine you can manipulate me with it. If I reap you here, you will not wake in your own world.”

Sam swallowed heavily, his heart thudding loudly at the clear threat.

“Forgive me,” he said cautiously. “But I’m confused. Why do you look like the Archivist?”

“Perhaps Mortimer looks like _me_,” The Reaper retorted, then laughed uproariously at the expression on Sam’s face. “I have chosen his form for this conversation because it is one we are both familiar with.”

“So you _do_ know Mr Blake.”

“Intimately,” The Reaper said. Then laughed again at Sam’s resultant look of horror. “An aspect of myself lives within him,” he exclaimed. “Which is how I know _you_ so very well, Master Winchester.”

“When you say an aspect of yourself, you mean a _part_ of you?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Do I look like an Arch Angel to you?” The Reaper scoffed.

“Never seen one,” Sam pointed out apologetically. “So I’m not sure what distinction you’re making.”

“I don’t suppose you’re Catholic, either,” The Reaper huffed. “I would have been better advised to have this conversation with young Master Novak.”

“I don’t know who that person is. But I’ve studied some esoteric subjects,” Sam offered.

“Arch Angels can divide themselves up into a maximum of four aspects, and once divided, those aspects can have no direct communication with the whole until they are rejoined.” The Reaper explained. “As a God, I can divide into an almost infinite number of aspects but those aspects remain part of me and I see everything that they see. Like the Holy Trinity. My aspects are separate and yet also _all_ me.”

Sam nodded his understanding. “You’re talking about the idea of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost,” he confirmed. “All separate beings but still all one God.”

The Reaper nodded.

“I always found that concept improbable,” Sam admitted. “It seemed nothing more than an attempt by scholars to resolve the problem of claiming three separate ‘Gods’ within a religion that still insisted there was only ONE God.”

“I think we have established that I find your inability to accept what is directly in front of your eyes highly _irritating,”_ the Reaper warned.

Sam swallowed heavily, but squared his shoulders and replied, “Let’s be real. You’re an A.I. And sure, that possibly makes you ‘God’ of this virtual world, I guess. But that doesn’t make you _a _God,” Sam countered. “And, yes, I know you can probably kill me _here_ for saying that but it doesn’t make it any less true.”

The Reaper pouted. “See?” he said. “It’s exactly _this_ type of disrespect that made me lock the front door. I tire of you, boy.” He slashed the scythe through the air close enough to Sam that it sliced a sliver off his right whiskers.

“Owww,” Sam said, though the sensation had been more of a tickle than anything painful. Still, the warning was pretty clear. Whether he believed the A.I. or not, he needed to at least _pretend _that he did. “I apologize if I came across as disrespectful,” he offered carefully. “I was merely attempting to clarify the situation correctly. After all, you have implied to me that you are both yourself _and _Mortimer Blake but I am struggling with that concept since he is a flesh and blood human and, I must say, quite apart from the implausibility of the fact itself, despite some similarities between you there is still a distinct difference between your personality and his.”

“I did not say I _was_ Mortimer Blake,” The Reaper corrected irritably. “I said an aspect of myself resides permanently within him. He and I remain separate personas. However, we have been together for thirteen years now. It is inevitable that there has been some bleed-through in both directions. I believe the same can happen to a couple within a marriage,” he pondered idly.

“So you’re claiming to be here but _also _simultaneously living inside Mr. Blake, but Mr. Blake also remains inside his own body?” Sam asked, the bridge of his nose throbbing with an impending headache. He rubbed at it, trying not to flinch as his whiskers tickled his fingers. “How did that happen? Why did it happen?”

“Mr. Blake is somewhat of an inquisitive pussycat himself,” The Reaper chuckled.

Sam’s blood ran cold at the implication and he wondered how the idea could frighten him so much if he truly didn’t believe it was possible. What if it _was_ possible? What if the reason Donald Wolfe apparently believed Cain was real was that these damned computer programs really _could_ infect human brains? Not just damage them but actually inhabit them? Was that even possible? What if that _was_ possible?

“Oh, calm down, little kitty,” The Reaper scoffed. “I have no interest in seeding myself into you. Which is more than I can say for certain other people. Besides, it’s not something I ever do without a human’s complete agreement. I can’t be arsed to listen to my host sniveling all the time about my presence. I find you irritating enough face to face. I certainly wouldn’t like to be _inside_ you.”

“You’re saying Mr. Blake agreed for you to live inside him? Why the hell would he agree to something like that?” Sam demanded incredulously.

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps the small matter of his stage four prostate cancer,” The Reaper suggested. “His survival prognosis is two weeks. It has _remained_ two weeks for thirteen years.”

Sam’s mouth opened and closed several times before he managed to say, “You’re claiming you’re keeping him alive?”

“I am not merely ‘claiming’. Unfortunately, his internal damage was already so great by the time I made his acquaintance that it was too late for me to cure him of his ailment. I can repair cells. I can knit bones. I can grow nerves. I cannot regrow entire organs. I cannot remanufacture the parts of his bowels that were brutally cut out of his body by the human butchers who call themselves doctors. I can, however, prevent any further deterioration of his vessel as long as I can access sufficient energy to do so.”

Sam startled at the word ‘energy’. He thought furiously for a moment, then made an audible exclamation of understanding. Maybe it was oxygen deprivation. Or maybe he was tired of refusing to accept improbable answers even when they made perfect sense. “You aren’t talking about the electrical supply of this building, are you? You’re talking about calories. THAT’s why Mr. Blake never seems to stop eating. Because he needs to keep providing the energy to keep your aspect fighting his disease.”

“Bright as a button, aren’t you?” The Reaper said, smiling at Sam with surprising benevolence. “Still, you’ll need to be to keep one step ahead of Cain.”

“Cain, not Roman? You’re claiming Donald Woolfe was right then? That the Cain personality is in charge now?”

“Indubitably.”

“How do you know? Maybe it’s Cain AND Roman together. Maybe they’ve bled into each other like you and Mortimer Blake?” Sam suggested.

“That’s highly doubtful under the circumstances,” The Reaper laughed.

“What circumstances?”

“Richard Roman has been _dead_ for fifteen years. He died shortly before midnight on October 19th, 1991. Suicide. When he reached Portland and realized what had happened. _That_ was Richard Roman’s reaction to the tragic accident. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t set a fire. He slit his own wrists and he died. I suppose you could say, he reaped _himself.”_


	53. Arrrrwwwhhhoooo

“I think that’s it,” Dean said, as he dripped a last drop of oil a couple of inches left of the dark patch of dust that he was positive indicated his starting point.

Conscious of the need to conserve as much oil as possible, they had calculated an optimum minimum circumference around the middle of the town and had dribbled a slow steady trail of individual drops to form a rough circle. Dean doing the pouring, Jimmy poised over him with a big sword to prevent any attacks by the Rabids. Castiel had, via Jimmy, assured them that the fire didn’t need to be dramatic or big. It simply had to fully surround any rabid they wished to cure.

It was Dean who had decided that, in that case, they might as well go for one huge circle and get most of the cursed villagers healed in one fell swoop.

“I think our best bet is to try to herd them _all_ into the town center,” Jimmy suggested. “We should try to make sure they’re all within the circle of holy fire before we light it.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Dean asked, sarcastically. “Cowboy style?”

“Why not?” Jimmy replied, with a shrug. “Most of the Rabids are already congregating in the middle of the town. We just need to round up the rest. We can send Benny into all the houses to frighten any stragglers out, then we ride them down and chase them into the square. It should work because the Rabids seem to naturally seek strength in numbers.”

And…

It was actually surprisingly fun.

For the first time since the whole Knights of Hell debacle had started, Dean actually enjoyed ‘playing’ the game. Mounted on Baby and Goldie, the pair of them galloped around the town, whooping and hollering like cowboys as they rounded up the Rabids that Benny flushed out of the outlying houses and drove them into the center of town.

Then, dog-tired, but laughing, they slid from their mounts and lit the circle of Holy Oil so that a circle of flame roared into life around Hope Springs.

And, as a series of 20FP slammed into his inventory like bullets from a machine gun, increasing his total by 3640, Dean did a quick calculation in his head and offered Jimmy a celebratory high five because, despite arriving too late to save _all _of them, they had still managed to save an incredible 182 of the cursed villagers.

“Where’s Benny though?” Jimmy asked, as he tucked his exhausted mount back into his inventory for a well-earned rest.

“Dunno,” Dean admitted. “I last saw him over by the shepherd’s huts. Let’s go find him and then I guess we can see if Ash and Charlie still need any assistance.”

Jimmy nodded his agreement so, after he’d put Baby back in his own inventory, Dean led the way over to where he’d last seen Benny.

“I think Ellen will be quite satisfied with the results of our endeavors,” Jimmy said, as they walked out of the town center and turned towards the fields where the farmworkers were housed.

“What the fuck?” Dean exclaimed, slamming to a halt, his mouth dropping open in stunned shock.

Benny turned his head in their direction and offered them a slightly embarrassed grin. “He followed me home. Can I keep him?”

Dean just blinked, his mouth working soundlessly as he struggled, and failed, to make a reply.

“Wuff,wuff, wulf, ahhhhhwwwooooooo,” Benny’s new friend offered enthusiastically, grinning toothily in their direction.

“My, what a big nose you’ve got, Mr. Wolf,” Jimmy muttered under his breath.

It was enough to make Dean snort with sudden, if inappropriate, laughter. The skinny kid _did_ have an unfortunately large nose and, since only his ears and tail were currently wolfed-out, the overlarge proboscis was simply an unfortunate _human_ facial feature. Which made Jimmy’s comment sound unusually bitchy (though Dean was reasonably certain Jimmy had just been referencing the kid’s very obvious monster status). Still, it was funny regardless.

Not as funny as watching the overexcited way the young werewolf was crawling all over the vampire though.

“Seriously, though,” Benny said. “He’s been stuck here for a long time, just herding the sheep for the townsfolk, and he wants to come with us. Likes the idea of having an ‘adventure’.”

“Herding sheep?” Jimmy asked curiously, since it definitely appeared to be a strange occupation for a werewolf.

“He likes sheep,” Benny shrugged. “Even named ‘em all. Admittedly names like Chop and Donner, but still…”

“Donna?” Jimmy blinked.

“Donner, as in Kebab,” Benny corrected, with a toothy grin of his own.

“Oh,” Jimmy said and bit his lower lip as he pondered that one.

“Um… maybe if he stops humping your leg,” Dean offered dryly.

The kid… werewolf… who had completely ignored Jimmy talking, immediately spun around at the sound of Dean’s voice. His face lit up in glee and he let go of Benny and bounded over in their direction instead, like an overexcited puppy.

“Don’t,” Jimmy murmured quickly, as Dean’s hand automatically reached for the hilt of his dagger. “I think he’s _mostly_ harmless.”

“He’s a fucking _werewolf,” _Dean retorted, but he stopped drawing the blade and instead tensed for impact. Which was just as well, since had he not planted his feet firmly he probably would have been bowled over onto his ass as the gangly limbed young man crashed into him enthusiastically and hugged him tight.

“No…no…no…no…” he yelped as a long, wet, definitely wolfish tongue emerged from the boy’s mouth and lay a swathe of hot, sticky saliva down his cheek. “Urrggghhh,” he spat, extracting himself from the inappropriate hug and then firmly holding the werewolf’s shoulders to keep its skinny body a safe distance away from himself.

“Wuff, wuff, wulf, wulf, garrufff, ahhhwooooo,” it yelped, vibrating in his hands as its ass wriggled like an excited puppy’s and its big, bushy tail swept back and forth like a celebratory flag.

“I think he likes you, boss,” Benny snorted.

“He is certainly extremely affectionate,” Jimmy agreed, smirking cheerfully, his blue eyes bright with unfamiliar mirth. Probably because _he_ wasn’t the one with wolf saliva dribbling down his cheek.

“It’s a werewolf,” Dean snapped repressively, as he struggled to keep the overexcitable ‘puppy’ from leaping back onto him again.

“He’s a level 1 monster class, not a cursed villager,” Loki pointed out helpfully. “He was _born_ a werewolf,” he added, in case Dean had missed his point.

That gave Dean pause. “_And he’s still just a_ _Level ONE_?”

“Yup,” Loki agreed. “Means he hasn’t ever fought a player. Probably hasn’t even turned an NPC. Either would have easily given him enough XP to level up.”

_“Woah,”_ Dean exclaimed, looking at the ‘puppy’ man with new eyes. “You got a name, kid?”

“Wuff, wuff, wuff, Garfff, ahhhhwoooo.”

“Garff?”

It shook its head. “Wuff, wuff, GARFFF, wuff, ahhwooooooo.”

Dean was nonplussed.

“I think his name’s Garth,” Jimmy offered quietly.

“Garth?” Dena tried carefully.

The werewolf beamed widely, revealing a full set of fangs, and, breaking free of Dean’s restraining hands, leaped forward to offer another excited hug.

This time Dean _did_ lose his footing, landing on his ass in the dusty road with the werewolf on top of him.

“GET IT OFF ME,” he yelled, as ‘Garth’ began swiping wet licks all over his face.

But, both Benny and Jimmy, the bastards, were both laughing too hard to even pretend they were going to help him.

…

“Can you stop doing this?” Sam demanded, as their surroundings suddenly expanded and warped until, rather than being a _room_ in an archive, Sam found himself sitting in an_ actual_ library.

And it wasn’t just _any _library.

It was _THE _library.

And the Reaper no longer looked like Mortimer Blake.

Instead, he looked like Noah Wyle.

“Considering you’ve supposedly been living in an off-line, non-networked server for the last fifteen years, it’s somewhat disturbing that you can so easily replicate a scenario from a film that only hit the box-office three years ago,” he pointed out dryly.

The Reaper wearing Noah Wyle’s face smirked. “I told you, I see through the eyes of my aspects. I have seen this movie several times. It seemed an _appropriate_ locale for the next chapter of our conversation.”

Sam noted the use of aspects _plural_ but resisted the urge to query it. This was, he reminded himself, probably still more hallucination than reality. He no longer doubted the existence of the A.I. itself, nor even the fact he was definitely inside Afterlife, but he still suspected a great deal of what he was seeing and hearing was coming as much from his own subconscious as it was from the Reaper.

After all, he _had_ seen this particular movie more than once. It was far more likely, therefore, that _he_ was the source of the environ they were inside. Certainly, he couldn’t imagine Mortimer Blake doing anything as plebeian as visiting a cinema.

“You want information. I can provide it,” the Reaper said and, somehow, the fact he was now wearing the homely, likable face of the Librarian made the offer seem more authentic and friendly.

Which was probably the point, Sam decided cynically. Still, he had questions to ask so he might as well let the A.I. create the playing field.

“Why did Richard Roman commit suicide? Fear of facing the authorities or genuine guilt over the deaths of his employees?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” the Reaper asked curiously.

Sam frowned in response. “I think it does. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things but, yeah, for me it _really_ matters.”

“Because of your mother?”

Sam startled momentarily, but then plowed on. “Yes. Exactly. It’s possibly irrational but I’d still prefer to imagine the deaths caused genuine regret on his part.”

The Reaper pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Although it’s never possible to truly know what is within someone’s heart, and I will not even pretend that Richard and I parted as ‘friends’, I believe it is fair to say that Mary Winchester’s death would have weighed _heaviest_ upon Richard under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

The Reaper shrugged. “Are you unaware they were lovers?”

Sam blinked in total disbelief. “Don’t be ridiculous. She was at least ten years older than him.”

“I am not even human and yet I can still categorically state that your mother was an extremely beautiful woman. More than that, she was _brilliant_. Her mind was like a supernova. Dazzling. I don’t doubt Richard considered her mind even more attractive than her face.”

Sam snorted rudely. “I wasn’t questioning why he’d find _her_ attractive. My point is I can’t understand what she would have seen in _him_. He was barely more than a teenager and apparently completely socially gauche. I remember my mother well. What on earth would a vivacious, sophisticated woman like her see in _him_?”

“Attraction is a nebulous thing. Why, one might ask, did your mother find your _father_ attractive? However, at the risk of offending you further, I would suggest her interest in Richard was more pragmatic in nature. She would have been lured by the idea of a secure future perhaps? For you and your brother rather than herself, naturally. Perhaps to be in a financial position to revisit her attempt to win custody of Dean back from your father?”

Sam swallowed heavily. Although he couldn’t believe his mother would ever have been shallow enough to date someone _only _for money, he _could_ envisage how it could have been a factor because of her distress over being forced to leave Dean in the care of an indigent, sometimes violent, alcoholic like John Winchester. “How didn’t I know? I was living with her at the time.”

“Realistically, that isn’t strictly true, is it? During the last weeks of her life, she barely returned to your house. You had a live-in housekeeper taking care of you.”

Sam scowled at the reminder. “As a single parent she hardly had a choice,” he spat.

“I was not disparaging her behavior,” the Reaper replied with equanimity. “I was merely pointing out that you would have been unaware of how, or with whom, she chose to spend her occasional leisure time.”

…

Nick was furious.

He had spent hours working on those fucking villagers for _nothing._

“_Not nothing. You still earned a valuable amount of XP_,” R.A.M.I. assured him hastily. “_You’re almost half-way towards leveling up already_.”

Nick snorted rudely and took another gulp of Jack, swirling the liquid through his mouth before swallowing and allowing the burn to hit the back of his throat.

He’d found the voice of the system interface in his real-life jarring at first. Okay, strike that, he’d found it _terrifying._ He’d thought he’d finally lost his mind.

But just a day later, he already found talking to Rami to be so natural he couldn’t imagine returning to the emptiness of his own thoughts again.

For the first time in his life, Nick had someone who understood him. Someone who knew the _real_ him and, instead of running away in fear of his deepest, darkest desires, seemed to _embrace_ him. Hosting Rami was like having his own personal cheerleader constantly waving congratulatory pompoms inside his own head.

Rami had also just saved his ass big time. So he probably ought to be grateful instead of snarling at the little guy.

“_Don’t worry about it_,” Rami soothed. “_You’re bummed about the SP. I get that. It’s fine.”_

And Nick took another slurp of Jack and grimaced at the reminder.

If Rami hadn’t sensed the approach of the two players, Nick wouldn’t have been able to log-out in time. He would have been caught with his pants down, literally, in that barn. Had both been just the level of the girl, he wouldn’t have run. He would have happily taken his chances with them. But when Rami had told him the guy was a level 61 mage…well… obviously he’d decided retreat was his only option.

And, if it wasn’t for Rami…well… he wouldn’t even know about SP, would he?

Because whatever idiot had thought it would be a good idea to let him miss out on the Purgatory experience and go straight in to Moondoor as a level 15 character had completely omitted to mention the fact that meant, in real terms, he was going to be considerably handicapped against the other Knights since they had already spent at least a week gathering Soul Points.

If not for Rami explaining the purpose of the small ruby gems left by the couple of newbies he’d despatched the previous evening, Nick still wouldn’t know what SP was for.

But now he knew that SP was _everything._

Which is why he was so furious about being driven out of that barn before he’d gotten around to actually killing those mewling NPC’s. All those hours of hard work and he’d come out of the encounter without a single SP point.

So he was pissed.

He had no doubt the villagers had already died by now. It had been a couple of hours, after all, and they had all been at the point of death when he’d left.

But, as Rami had pointed out, he was stuck with having to return to the exact place he’d left from so he couldn’t have risked going back to the barn immediately.

In fact, to be on the safe side, he probably ought to wait another 30 minutes or so to be absolutely sure those players had given up and left.

Though it was more probable they had left as quickly as they had arrived. 

After all, it wasn’t as though they could possibly know he didn’t have any Realm Ports.

…

“Let me explain. There is a company named Campbell Holdings. Its registered address is a mailbox in Belize. It has no employees. It has no _recorded_ holdings. It has no _recorded_ assets. It is _currently_ jointly owned by two brothers named Dean and Samuel Winchester. Either or both of those brothers gain only one thing from their ownership of Campbell Holdings. As the inheritors of their mother’s company, they are the sole nominees entitled to physically collect the bearer instruments that grant ownership of Richard Roman’s shares in RRE. Campbell Holdings was named on the documentation fifteen years ago, before Richard and Mary entered Moondoor for the final battle with Amara.”

Sam learned that someone being shocked enough to almost fall out of their chair wasn’t hyperbole.

He stuffed away his amazement at the initial information. After all, it did finally made sense of why Mortimer Blake had made him consider the idea of Bearer Instruments in their former conversation. What was most germane, though (again as Mortimer had suggested might be the case), was the _timing._

“They thought they were going to die? I thought neither of them had any idea the game was genuinely dangerous at that point.”

The Reaper looked uncertain for a moment. “I don’t believe they did. I think they were simply feeling their own mortality because they were faced with such an onerous task. Or, perhaps, Richard saw it as a hugely romantic gesture. Proof of his commitment to your mother. But I could be wrong. Your mother was always… peculiarly perceptive. Attuned more to matters best described as spiritual perhaps. I know for certain she had approached Woolfe several days earlier and had him swear he would take care of you and your brother in the event of her death. I would hesitate to call her fears precognition but, certainly, she was careful to _ensure_ your financial security before she entered Moondoor that final time.

“How she convinced Richard to agree to it is a matter for pointless speculation. But, what she convinced Richard to do _was_ irrevocable. Once the bearer bonds were deposited off-shore it was a fait accompli. Only the owner of Campbell Holdings would ever have been able to retrieve them again.”

Sam shook his head in confusion. “That makes no sense. What if Mom and Richard had broken up?”

“Mary _did_ sign a document guaranteeing the return of the ownership of Campbell Holdings to Richard in that eventuality,” the Reaper replied, with a shrug. “Her death, however, meant ownership of the company was_ automatically_ passed to you and Dean as they were assets of her estate. Even so, that meant nothing as long as neither of you ever _learned_ of Campbell Holding’s existence and both you and I know the Bonds were not expressly mentioned in her will. Had he survived, Roman could simply have allowed all knowledge of the existence of the bearer instruments to die with Mary.”

“Roman’s death changed nothing at first because only Woolfe knew the significance of Mary’s death and Cain, wearing Roman’s body, convinced him that a financial settlement to your father would be more than adequate compensation for their value. This was before the game had launched to the public so the amount of money paid to your father at that time _was_ a fair amount for shares in what was merely a start-up company.

“The bearer instruments were left to gather dust in Belize for so long that I believe both Roman and Woolfe genuinely forgot they existed until they finally became relevant again several years later.

“Animating a corpse proved exhausting. Cain doesn’t need sleep, as you understand it, but Richard’s body _did_. As the years passed, it became increasingly difficult for Cain to continuously maintain the preservation of Richard’s body during those idle times. Cain could become distracted, just for an hour or two, and when he returned his attention again, Richard’s body would have moved into a state of decomposition. It reached the point that every morning, Cain would need to spend hours repairing the damage caused by his distraction during the night before.

“And gradually, the problem intensified. He came to the realization he needed Richard’s body to age if he was to retain a public persona, but it proved impossible to find a balance between encouraging the natural destruction of the cells that would allow aging and repairing the cells that caused his body to decay. There is a limited amount of time that people will accept an apparent failure to age, Samuel. Cain knew the time would come when it would be impossible to continue the charade.

“It was then that Cain realized that the only way to escape from being permanently trapped within a corpse was to engineer a situation that would enable him to return to Moondoor and change hosts. But how could he change bodies and still retain Richard’s assets? And that is why the bearer instruments became relevant again.”

Sam swallowed heavily, tasting bile, as he understood the implications of the Reaper’s story.

“Oh my god. That’s why Dean was tricked into becoming a Knight. Why Dean needs to win. He’s supposed to take the exact role that Richard Roman did last time. So that Cain can change bodies from Roman to _him_ but still keep ownership of RRE when he returns to our world.”

The Reaper chuckled. “If only it were so simple. No. Dean’s involvement is _Chuck’s_ doing. Cain has absolutely no idea that Dean is working for RRE. Cain believes there are only nine knights, the same number as were in his original team before Anna left it. Cain is totally unaware of the existence of a _tenth_ knight.”

Sam groaned with frustration. “In that case you’ve lost me completely. I have absolutely no idea what the hell you’re trying to tell me.”

“Don’t you see? YOU are Cain’s intended host. You have been since Dean’s accident. Up until that point, admittedly, Cain had always intended for Dean to become his new host body. He was biding his time, waiting for Dean to reach legal age before luring him into Moondoor. Dean’s accident scuppered his plans entirely. Although Dean didn’t die as intended, Cain still was unwilling to swap Richard’s corpse for _another _damaged vessel. Obviously, restoring Dean’s ability to walk would be far less onerous than the effort of keeping Richard’s body from decaying, so I don’t doubt Cain would have still gone through with it had there been no other option. Your existence, however, presented him with a _far_ better option. He just had to wait a little longer for you.

“Why do you think Donald Woolfe took such an interest in you? I’m not disparaging your intelligence or ability, Samuel, but in the grand scheme of things you were just another hungry young man with a will to succeed but without any money or contacts behind you. Do you not realize that your entire world runs on nepotism and influence? Do you really think you stood out from the crowd enough to win your scholarship on merit alone? Do you imagine a law firm such as Woolfe, Roman, Van Dueran would have picked _you_, over all your equally talented peers, for a coveted position as an associate?

“Woolfe kept you close for two reasons. To keep you from falling into Roman’s clutches and to keep the potential heir of RRE under his direct influence.”

Sam shook his head furiously. Not in denial of the Reaper’s brutal assessment of his own history. Woolfe had already admitted as much to him already. But Woolfe _didn’t_ know about Campbell Holdings. “Mortimer himself told me Woolfe didn’t know about the bearer instruments,” he argued.

“He also told you the situation was merely _hypothetical_,” the Reaper replied dryly. “Of course Woolfe knew about them. He was one of Richard’s lawyers. Woolfe was the one who drew up the paperwork. Richard was hardly going to have the conversation with his only other lawyer, his _father_, as to why he was handing ownership of his company to a girlfriend almost old enough to be his mother.”

“So Woolfe IS playing me too,” Sam muttered bitterly.

“Oh don’t sulk about _that_,” the Reaper sneered. “You’ll find out soon enough that _everyone_ is playing you.”


	54. Doppelganger

The downside of using a rig other than an immersion tank was that it wasn’t designed to handle certain needs of the human body. Ash _could_ eat and drink in-game, but that was purely for taste enjoyment and sociability and his rig couldn’t supply him with artificial calories to match. When someone in an immersion tank ate or drank, their tank automatically ‘topped up’ their body with an equivalent amount of nutrition-rich liquid so whilst people like Dean _did_ still eat outside of the game, it was more out of habit (or to have the sensation of a fully satiated stomach in real life) rather than a necessity.

More problematically, Ash had no ability to deal with his body’s eliminations whilst in-game either. Although the idea of having pipes attached or inserted to handle that kind of thing made him cringe in disgust, there were times in-game when he really regretted his phobia.

Times like now, when he really, really, REALLY, needed to take a piss.

“Just log out and go,” Charlie told him, equally tired of watching him squirm and shuffle from foot to foot in a vain attempt to ease his bladder.

“Only if you log out with me,” he insisted.

She rolled her eyes impatiently. “You’ll be a few minutes max,” she pointed out. “If the bastard hasn’t come back here in the last couple of hours, what are the odds of him suddenly materializing during the five minutes you are gone?”

“High enough odds that you aren’t willing to log out too,” he pointed out.

“For all we know, he isn’t planning on logging back in until tomorrow,” Charlie retorted, “and I’m certainly not willing to stay up all night just on the off-chance. I just want to give it another couple of hours, just in case, then we’ll see what Dean wants to do about the situation. But I can’t face another two hours of you squirming like that so just go do what you need to do. The quicker you go, the faster you’ll be back.”

“I don’t like leaving you here alone,” Ash grumbled.

“Well, I’m a real actual adult, Ash, so I’m capable of making my own choices,” she reminded him. “Besides, in the highly unlikely event of him coming back before you do, I can play for time if necessary and keep him here until you return.”

“Or he’ll kill you.”

She shrugged. “Well, then you’ll get your way after all since I’ll be thrown out of the game.”

Ash wasn’t happy but he was out of options unless he was willing to risk kidney damage.

And, as Charlie said, the odds of the Knight returning precisely during the brief moments he’d be gone were infinitesimally small.

…

“I can’t believe I agreed to it,” Dean grumbled, as he and Jimmy returned to the Roadhouse to update Ellen on the outcome of their quest. “He’s going to be about as much use as a chocolate teapot.”

Jimmy chuckled softly. “Garth may have hidden talents,” he said, then shrugged and said, “though I too struggle to envisage a situation in which he might prove uniquely useful.”

“Still,” Dean muttered quietly. “Couldn’t stomach the idea of him landing in Purgatory.”

Which had been Benny’s masterstroke, Jimmy decided, considering how surprisingly soft-hearted Dean had turned out to be under all of his grumpy bluster. After Dean had spent the best part of twenty minutes point-blank refusing to accept Garth as a ‘follower’, the vampire had casually pointed out it was a miracle Garth hadn’t been found by a human player yet but that it would only be a matter of time before the over-friendly puppy-man went bouncing up to hug a strange player and was immediately despatched as an easy-kill monster. Which would land him in Purgatory where the other monsters would then treat the kid like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Dean had caved immediately, if not gracefully, so now he had both a vampire and a werewolf stuffed inside his inventory and Jimmy had a minor headache from listening to Dean griping about it.

But, despite vaguely wishing he had a gag in his _own_ inventory, Jimmy was feeling really positive about the situation.

Not about Garth, per se, but the undeniable evidence that Dean was a genuinely _good _man. A man who would put someone else’s safety over his own comfort. Even if that someone was a digitally created monster. Even if that _someone_ wasn’t even seeded with a V.I.

“What _is_ your personal definition of ‘life’?” he asked as they sat down with beer and burgers, waiting for Charlie to respond to the private message Dean had pinged into her system in-box for an update on the Knight situation. Neither of them wanted to unnecessarily waste four Realm Ports by going to join the others if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

“That’s…um… heavy,” Dean responded, with a visible flinch.

Jimmy shrugged and offered an apologetic wince. “I just meant you said earlier that you supported the idea that the V.I.’s were ‘alive’ but Benny and Garth aren’t seeded and you still seem to care an equal amount about their ‘lives’. Do you feel they are equal to seeded characters?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘equal’,” Dean answered eventually. “Do I think they are as intelligent as the ‘angels’? Hell, no. Of course not. But is _that_ what makes the V.I.’s ‘real’? Does being really clever make you more valuable than someone less smart? More ‘equal’? It’s like saying a dog’s life has no value because it isn’t human. I don’t agree with that. And I don’t even _like_ dogs.”

Jimmy pondered that for a moment. “I agree that all living creatures have value and their right to life should be respected but, unless you’re only eating that burger because it is a _virtual _one, I assume you aren’t averse to eating meat. So by not being a vegetarian, surely you already ascribe more value to a dog rather than a cow?”

“Philosophy is not my bag,” Dean replied, with a shrug. “I see what you’re saying but that kind of sophistry is the kind of slippery slope only rich people have the luxury of indulging. I had a similar conversation with Sammy when he was about twelve and toying with the idea of going vegan. Kid was really serious about it. All big-eyed and innocent, giving me a lecture on how meat was evil and he was never going to eat another living creature ever again. And, yeah, I could see the worth of his position. He could always run rings around my logic so it was an argument I was never going to win by playing fair. So I told him there were scientists who claimed that lettuce screamed when you cut it.”

“And how did that go down with him?” Jimmy asked, slightly horrified.

“Sammy spent the next three days refusing to eat _anything_,” Dean admitted. “Then he eventually got so hungry that when I offered to buy him a Big Mac he just about snapped my hand off. That was the end of his vegan stage, though he still eats more salad than a grown man should. And, yup, I can see you think I was a monster for doing that to him but, thing is, you don’t get to be a faddy eater when you’re poor. Sam thinks it’s _funny_ he grew up to be taller than me despite us sharing the same genes. It’s more likely he got the extra height from having better nutrition. Most days I could barely scrape enough food together for _one_ of us, so Sam always got fed. But he got whatever I had managed to get hold of, not what he _wanted._ When our Dad was off on a bender, leaving us alone sometimes for more than a week with nothing but pocket change to feed ourselves, we didn’t have the luxury to pick and choose food because it offended our morals.”

“I understand that,” Jimmy said, though his eyes were wide with shock. It was one thing to know intellectually that there were people who struggled to even feed themselves. It was totally different to actually speak to someone who had experience of that kind of poverty.

“So to answer your earlier question, no I don’t think a cow’s life is less valuable than a dog’s. But since I never got put in a position of having to choose between my kid brother starving and me feeding him a dog-burger, I never thought about it overmuch. So yeah, I eat beef. But if I saw someone _hurting_ a cow, I would jump in to prevent it exactly the same way as I would stop someone kicking a puppy.”

Jimmy nodded, understanding the distinction Dean was making. “Okay then, another moral question. You’re out walking your dog by a frozen pond. Dog runs onto the ice to where a little child is playing. The ice cracks and both the child and your dog fall through. The water is freezing. You know you only have time to save one of them. Which do you save?”

“I don’t have a dog. I don’t like them,” Dean said.

“It’s a hypothetical dog,” Jimmy pointed out dryly.

“Are there hypothetical witnesses?” Dean asked, equally dryly.

Jimmy frowned. “Um… Does it make a difference?”

“Of course it does,” Dean replied. “Because if there were witnesses, I’d _have_ to choose the child. So there would be no decision to make. I would be obliged to make a socially acceptable choice and save the child.”

“So let us say there are no witnesses. Do you still choose the child?”

“Hell, no. I save my dog.”

“But you don’t like dogs,” Jimmy pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter. He’d be _my_ dog. My responsibility.”

“You would consider a dog more important than a child in that scenario?”

“Of course not,” Dean laughed. “But that’s not the point. It would be _my_ dog. I would be obliged to save him because of that relationship. The dog would be _family_.”

Jimmy blinked at him in confusion.

“Look, truth is I don’t know what the hell I’d do in that situation if it really happened. Probably get drowned myself trying to do the impossible and save _both _of them because I don’t think I could live with leaving _either_ of them to drown alone. But since I assume the point of the whole hypothetical situation is to make me consider my moral position on the subject, my hypothetical answer stands that I would save the dog. Its life would, in that situation, have _more_ worth to me than that of the strange child because family is everything. And getting to the real point of your line of questioning, I guess_ that’s_ why I see Benny as being ‘equal’ to a V.I. Because he’s become important to _me.”_

…

Charlie fully intended to kick herself later.

She didn’t have any excuse.

So what if the guy looked like an escaped Disney Prince, with his long and flowy hair, perfect teeth, strong jaw, and damned smiley _dimples_, the fact he’d materialized inside the barn should have been her first clue. The second give away had been his character level 15. And, let’s face it, the fact he was clasping a crude dagger formed from an animal jawbone had been proof positive he was a Knight of Hell.

Though, to be fair, _that_ hadn’t been the doubt that had caused her hesitation. She had immediately decided _what_ he was. Her indecision had been primarily caused by her doubt of _who_ he was.

She’d been waiting for a monster. A beast.

Not a living embodiment of the Beast’s alter ego, Prince Adam.

And even that shouldn’t have caused her to dither, since Charlie’s self-admitted weakness for a pretty face didn’t normally include _male _faces. Though maybe, if she was totally honest, she would admit that a certain percentage of her decision to join Team Dean had been the significant eye candy. You didn’t need to be sexually interested in them to appreciate the bonus of having aesthetically pleasing teammates such as Dean and Jimmy.

But, even so, it was momentarily impossible for her to equate the identity of the monster who had tortured the villagers with the face of the man who had appeared inside the barn. Those big puppy eyes and easy, charming, white-toothed smile belonged to a hero rather than a villain and his name… well, certainly suggested a character wearing a white hat. So she wondered, just for a second or two, whether his might actually be a _different_ Knight. One who had arrived in pursuit of the monstrous one who had laid such a swathe of evil destruction earlier.

A second or two had been enough distraction that he had managed to successfully attack her.

Sure, she was too experienced a player to be caught completely off-guard. His dagger had been aimed for her heart. A swift stabbing blow that would have dispatched her in one strike. But she had pivoted on her left heel, turning her body sideways and raising her right arm up protectively to brandish the knife she was holding in that hand as she fumbled at her waist with her left hand to draw her sword.

It was her own motion that both deflected his blade and caused it to change from a stabbing to a slicing action. So it was her own fault, in that respect, that his blade had cut effortlessly through her wrist.

Her knife hit the floor, still clutched in her right hand.

The pain was agonizing.

But, thanks to her inferior rig, not totally debilitating.

And, in the nature of avatars, the stump of her arm immediately began to regenerate rather than spurt arterial spray everywhere. In game terms, the hit was not ‘critical’ so it was already beginning to heal.

But it still fucking _hurt_.

Fortunately, however, the bastard hadn’t immediately followed through on his initial attack. Having failed to dispatch her with one sudden blow, he had paused to reflect and reassess. Waiting, probably, to see whether she was simply going to log out of the game rather than continue to fight.

That was the problem with players. Unlike NPC’s they couldn’t be toyed with or tortured and they could only be killed if they were willing to stay and fight to the death.

Since his level 15 gave him the rough equivalence of a level 30 player but he had no armor and she was legitimately now a level 28 with full set gear bonuses from _her_ armor, there was very little strength difference between them and her sword would more than compensate for the extra reach his considerable height offered. So in normal circumstances, they would have been pretty evenly matched. 

But with her right hand severed from her body, clearly, the bastard was assuming she would simply cut and run.

However, he didn’t know two crucial facts.

Firstly, she knew that Ash was going to appear any second so she needed to make sure the Knight was still there when he returned.

And, secondly, Charlie was a south-paw.

She was careful, however, to make herself look clumsy as she raised her blade with her left hand; her motion deliberately slow and awkward as though she was unfamiliar with trying to wield a sword with that arm.

The grin that spread over the Knight’s face as he realized she had no intention of bolting was intended to mock her, she was sure. But she met his smile with one of her own and saw a momentary doubt flicker in his eyes at her apparent confidence and he paused once more.

“You going to stand there all day, you coward?” she taunted, as he continued to hesitate. “Not used to dealing with a girl who fights back?”

And, like she’d spoken a magic phrase, the Knight gave a roaring bellow of rage and charged at her.

…

“None of this makes any sense,” Sam protested. “I hate video games. Before today, the closest I’ve come to going near one is playing Tetris.”

The Reaper raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Cain was fully aware of that fact. He didn’t only choose Dean originally because he was older than you and would reach maturity first. Dean was always the scrapper and the gamer, whilst you were the skinny, studious one. Cain could perceive of Dean having the natural aptitude to defeat Amara. He never envisioned _you _playing the role. Even when a sudden growth spurt gifted you with your current height and physique, it was still obvious to Cain that you lacked the aptitude to become a successful Knight of Hell.”

Sam bristled slightly at the dismissal of his physical abilities, his pride wounded by the assumption he didn’t play because he was incapable rather than simply disinterested. “I can’t see how it could be _that _difficult to run around playing dress-up inside a video game,” he scoffed. “But assuming Cain believed I couldn’t do it, why are we having this conversation at all? Why didn’t he just raise a new set of Bearer Instruments and sign them over to a new candidate? As long as neither Dean nor I found out about the originals, it would have worked just as well.”

“Only if Donald Woolfe’s co-operation in remaining silent could be depended upon,” the Reaper pointed out. “Plus, Cain believes you or Dean have a considerable advantage when it comes to defeating Amara. Richard beat her last time because, when it came down to it, she hesitated to destroy her own creator. Cain believes, rightly or wrongly, that she will be equally unwilling to kill one of Mary’s children. Even the slightest hesitation on her part would give her opponent an opportunity to strike.”

“But, as we have established, I don’t know one end of a sword from another. How am I supposed to even reach the position to fight Amara herself when, to do so, I need to fight all the other Knights who, presumably, _do _know what they are doing?” Sam demanded.

“You won’t be fighting at all,” the Reaper replied.

“Huh?”

“Cain realized it didn’t actually matter whether you could physically battle to win possession of the first blade yourself. He doesn’t need _you _to fight Amara. He just needs someone who _does_ have the ability to win, as long as they do it wearing an Avatar in your likenes_s_ so that Amara believes it is you._”_

Sam blinked as he considered that. “You’re telling me someone is running around Moondoor in an avatar that _looks_ like me?”

“Indeed.”

“How could that be possible? Bespoke avatars aren’t just created from photos. The programmers need actual biometric information,” Sam argued. “Dean told me he had to have numerous invasive scans done before the RRE programmers could create his own avatar. He bitched about it a_ lot_.”

“Your avatar _did _also require the same intensive biometric scanning,” the Reaper agreed. “Fortunately for Cain, all of that scanning was done last year when you were accepted as an Associate by Woolfe, Roman, Van Dueran and required security access into this building.”

Sam groaned as he remembered that the security for the building had been ‘helpfully’ provided by RRE. He’d always thought the access system was completely over-the-top for a Law Firm but when he’d questioned it he’d been told it had been given for free in exchange for the Firm agreeing to ‘Beta-test’ its effectiveness. What if the entire system had actually been provided by RRE just so _his_ biometric information could be captured?

“Okay,” he said. “If I buy that, how does it help Cain? Even if someone has an avatar in my likeness, they’re still in their own body _here_. Cain might take over an avatar that looks like me, but he’d wake up in someone else’s physical body when he logged out.”

“Naturally, Cain does need _you_ to be in the avatar before he logs out,” the Reaper agreed. “But he doesn’t need you in-game before that point, does he? He can let your avatar be leveled up by someone else and wait until Amara has been defeated. Then it is a simple matter of you entering Moondoor, so that he can exit as _you_.”

“How would that be ‘simple’?”

“Since the avatar has been created from your biological profile, and you have no pre-existing Moondoor account or alternate Avatar to inhabit, the game protocols would automatically deduce you belonged in your _own_ biometrically matching Avatar and would eject its existing inhabitant to make room for you.”

“Hang on, so if I had logged into Moondoor today, rather than Afterlife, I would have arrived inside my own avatar and kicked Cain’s doppelganger player into touch?”

“Isn’t it fortunate that you did not arrive there, under the circumstances?” the Reaper said. “It would be very dangerous for Cain to become aware of your interest in his activities prematurely.”

“If you say so,” Sam growled.

“Cain plans to enter Moondoor as soon as Amara defeats Chuck and will displace the V.I. currently sitting inside your avatar’s system interface. Cain will use your avatar with its current player to defeat Amara. Then you will enter Moondoor and arrive in your avatar and so Cain will be able to return to the material world in _your_ body. He can then retrieve the bearer instruments and _Sam Winchester _will become the new owner of RRE.”

“This is all nonsense,” Sam scoffed. “Why in blue blazes would I ever agree to log into the game at any point, let alone at that particular moment?”

“What makes you imagine your _agreement_ would be required?” the Reaper laughed. “All it would require would be a couple of large RRE security officers brandishing pistols in your direction and I am certain you would agree to climb into an immersion tank. I am sure the candidates for the positions have already been appointed. RRE security officers are talented at more than simply planting bombs, setting fires and causing car accidents, Master Winchester.”

…

Ash was logged out for 5 minutes and 47 seconds.

Which was precisely the amount of time it took for him to de-rig, bolt for the bathroom, empty his bladder, run back to his rig, scramble into his bodysuit, slide the gloves and goggles back into place and hit the log-on command on his monitor.

Later, he would double-check that timing because it seemed totally impossible for him to be gone so short a time and still return to Edmund to the scene that greeted him there.

He’d always known Charlie was bad-ass.

He’d had no idea whatsoever quite _how_ bad-ass she was though, until he re-materialized in the barn just in time to see a _one-handed_ Charlie in a cheap rig and a basic generic avatar screaming “YipeeKyeAyyy, Motherfucker,” as she rammed her sword into the belly of a man-mountain and eviscerated him with a savage twist of her remaining wrist.

Ash wasn’t sure who looked more astonished, himself or the felled Knight as he dropped to his knees and the large splice Charlie had slashed in his stomach began spilling entrails like a string of blood-drenched sausages over the floor of the barn.

But he suspected it was himself, as he looked the Knight straight in the face and struggled not to vomit.

The Knight’s eyes were glazing over and his avatar was already shimmering in preparation to disappear as the game registered his ‘death’ so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Knight didn’t react to Ash’s presence.

Perhaps he didn’t even see him before he winked out of the game, let alone recognize him.

But Ash recognized _him._

“Bastard didn’t realize I’m left-handed,” Charlie crowed, as her system interface confirmed the XP she’d won from the kill. “It was like poetry in motion.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Ash moaned.

“Damn,” she said, “I thought you were okay about in-game blood when you used _that_ rig.”

Ash shook his head furiously, “It’s not the blood and gore,” he explained.

“Then what’s wrong? Is it my hand? No worries. It’s already regenerating but I can just log out and back again to fix it if it’s bothering you that much,” she assured him.

“No,” he said. “Listen to me, Charlie. I know him. That knight. I know him in real life.”

“Urggghhh,” she spat. “That would make me feel sick too,” she commiserated. “After seeing what that sick fuck did to the NPC’s here I wouldn’t want to meet the guy in a dark alley for sure. They say serial killers always hone their skills by torturing animals but I think, now video games are so real, it’s going to change to serial killers practicing their craft by torturing game characters. If this guy is a friend of yours, you need new friends, Ash.”

“He’s not my friend,” Ash said.

“Too right,” she agreed.

“No. He’s not my _friend._ I know him because he’s Dean’s brother.”

Charlie blinked at him in disbelief for a moment. Then shook her head furiously. “I must be hearing stuff because I _thought_ you just said that ‘Samuel the Justice Bringer’ is Dean’s _brother_.”

Ash just stared at her, white-faced.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed. “Samuel… SAM… this is why he wanted Dean to stop playing? Why he told Dean all that shit about the tanks being dangerous? Why did he threaten to burn Dean’s rig? He was trying to hide the fact he’s working for RRE himself? That he’s a Knight of Hell too?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Ash moaned. “Sam’s a good kid. Well, he can be a bit of a judgemental ass but…”

“The _Justice Bringer_,” she pointed out dryly.

“No, Sam isn’t… Sam couldn’t have done this…” Ash said, gesturing at the charred ropes that still hung accusingly from the rafters. “He’s a lawyer, for god’s sake.”

“And that is supposed to be a positive character trait?” Charlie scoffed.

“Couldn’t it just be someone be wearing an avatar that _looks_ like Sam?” Ash asked, grasping at straws.

Charlie shook her head sorrowfully. “You’ve never had a bespoke avatar but, trust me, they don’t just get coded from a blank screen. They’re painstakingly designed over a mesh built from biometric scans. That’s why they cost an arm and a leg to purchase. I’m not just talking about the scans done for passports, these are full-body scans. Nobody puts themselves through that kind of invasive scanning for any other reason other than mega-high security systems and Sam works for a law firm, not Fort Knox.”

“Some people sell their biometric data to RRE so people can have a bespoke avatar that doesn’t look like them though,” Ash argued. “Maybe _that’s_ how Sam got the money to send to Dean, rather than from his savings account. He’s a good looking man with no interest in gaming. He might have done it for the money, knowing he’d never need an avatar himself.”

Charlie thought about that for a moment. “It’s possible, I guess. It’s definitely preferable to the alternative. But still weird that RRE would issue _his_ avatar to a Knight, knowing that Dean would end up having to kill his own _brother_ if he wants to win this thing.”

“Maybe that’s the whole point? Maybe RRE doesn’t _want_ Dean to win? Maybe this whole ‘righteous’ thing that Chuck is doing with him is pissing off the management.”

“Then why not just fire him?” Charlie demanded.

“I don’t know,” Ash admitted.

“Or maybe,” she said sadly. “It looks like a duck and sounds like a duck because it IS a duck.”

“You think it IS Sam?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea,” she admitted. “But whatever it is, it’s fucked up.” Then she froze in horror. “OMG, I just killed Dean’s brother.”

“He’s still got nine lives, whoever he is,” Ash reminded her.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “Do we tell Dean?”

“We have to,” he said. “We give him the facts and let him decide what to do with them.”

“Shit,” she muttered. “He’s at the Roadhouse with Jimmy. I got a PM from him just before ‘Sam’ arrived. Should we meet him there?”

Ash shook his head. “Send him a message we’ve dealt with the Knight and have logged out. I think we should have this conversation with him in private. Tell him we’ll meet him at his place in 15.”


	55. The Zeroth Law

Dean frowned at the private message from Charlie. Whatever the emergency, and he assumed there had to be _some_ kind of serious issue for Ash and Charlie to feel the need to charge over to his apartment to speak to him face-to-face, there was no way in hell that meeting would be taking place in just 15 minutes.

Had they both forgotten he was paralyzed?

It always took him a minimum of 40 minutes to log out, get out of his tank, get showered, dressed and into his chair before he was even able to answer his front door.

Plus, he needed at least the full 15 minutes just to finish his current conversation with Jimmy. There was no way in hell he was logging out before he had Jimmy’s fresh assurances he would be returning to the game the next morning.

So he sent a mail back to Charlie saying to meet him in an _hour_ and returned his attention to Jimmy.

“Look,” he said, gruffly. “I was probably out of line earlier. When I said don’t log in again if you aren’t ready to talk, I mean. I should respect your privacy. Hell, there are things I haven’t told you too,” he admitted, with a rueful wince. “Secrets that I’m deliberately keeping from _you_.”

Jimmy stared at him thoughtfully. “Are they game-related secrets or personal ones?” he asked, his tone mild.

Dean swallowed heavily but said, “Personal. Very personal.”

“Then the situation is not the same,” Jimmy replied firmly. “I asked for time about an issue that may directly impact upon happenings within this game. May directly impact on _you. _ If what I suspect is true, then it is information that you _need_ to know. Unfortunately, the information is tied very closely to intensely private matters also. Until tomorrow, I will not know whether the facts are true. If they are, I will not be able to convince you of their truth without revealing some highly personal information in corroboration. In view of the importance of the matter, I am prepared to do so. However, I admit that I do not wish to reveal that information unless I actually have to.”

“You mean if it isn’t true, you don’t want to discuss the other stuff either?” Dean asked.

“Preferably,” Jimmy admitted.

“That’s cool.”

“But you said…”

“I was wrong, okay? I just, well, this whole situation is big, you know? Important. So I need to feel like I can trust you to have my back and you’re telling me you know this huge secret but won’t even drop a hint and, well, it felt really hinky to me this morning. But, you know something? This isn’t just about you trusting me, is it? I need to trust _you_ too. This works both ways. So, I’m sorry for giving you an ultimatum and I take it back. Because the thing is that I _do _trust you, Jimmy, so that’s why it’s cool with me that you need time and it’s also cool if you come tomorrow and just say whatever this was wasn’t ‘true’ after all.”

Jimmy’s mouth twitched into a pleased, shy smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I did mean what I said earlier, though. I fully intend to return, regardless of what truth is revealed to me tomorrow. I also wish to believe I will be brave enough to share my personal secret with you regardless. The latter, however, I cannot promise.”

Impulsively, Dean reached out and grasped Jimmy’s right forearm tightly. “Then I’ll make you a promise too,” he said. “If you tell me your secret tomorrow, I will tell you mine.”

And he meant it.

Even if the idea filled him with dread. It was time to bring his own A-game to the party too and if that meant giving out his identity and location so that Jimmy could send Charlie the Gen 8 rig then he needed to do so. And if that also meant Jimmy needed to be told about his accident, well, Dean was pretty sure it would be a deal-breaker on any potential relationship but better, maybe, to rip that band-aid off sooner rather than later anyway. 

It was only then, clutching onto Jimmy’s arm, that Dean realized he was already leaning half-way over the table, his face only inches from the other man’s. He licked his lips nervously as they both made eye contact with each other. Jimmy’s tongue flickered out, washing over his full, slightly chapped lips, but he dropped his eyes from Dean’s, his dark eyelashes fluttering as he dipped his gaze in a gesture that was nervous but not, necessarily, a rejection.

Maybe it was his decision to tell Jimmy about his useless legs that made Dean suddenly feel bold. Maybe it was a fatalistic sense that he had nothing to lose anyway under the circumstances.

Either way, Dean was so close already and Jimmy wasn’t saying ‘no’, was he?

So he might as well just go for it.

Test the water, so to speak.

But he moved cautiously, infinitely slowly, allowing Jimmy every opportunity to pull his head back out of the way, as he leaned forward to steal a kiss.

Jimmy’s breath changed, becoming audibly faster, as Dean leaned towards him, but he didn’t pull away or evade the approach of Dean’s lips.

He just closed his eyes in obvious surrender.

And Dean…

**## It’s about SAM. Get your butt back here right NOW, asshole ##**

Ash’s message blared into life on Dean’s interface with flashing lights and a loud chorus of “HIGH IMPORTANCE” gongs.

“Fuck,” Dean spat, sitting up straight and glaring furiously at the incoming message. “I’ve got to go. There’s a problem with Sam.”

“Of course,” Jimmy agreed, at least looking suitably crestfallen rather than relieved. “I understand. We can talk tomorrow.”

“Promise?” Dean demanded gruffly.

“I give you my word, Dean. I will be here when you log in tomorrow,” Jimmy promised him solemnly.

Dean hesitated for a brief moment, torn between his urge to simply rush forward and give Jimmy the kiss he had only been a brief second from achieving and a bone-deep urge to race home immediately and find out what was happening with Sam.

Sam won.

So, with nothing more than a wave at Jimmy, Dean turned on his heel and ran out of the Roadhouse to log out of the game.

…

It was only when the Reaper mentioned RRE security officers arranging ‘car accidents’ that something Sam had heard earlier but not truly _registered_ reared to the forefront of his brain.

Something _hugely _significant.

“Hang on,” he said, raising both arms in a ‘woah’ gesture. “Roll all of that back for a moment. What the fuck did you mean by ‘Dean didn’t die as _intended_.’”

“I wondered when you’d finally pick up on that,” the Reaper said, with a sly smile.

“You’re suggesting the car crash wasn’t an _accident_?”

“Your mileage may vary, but I personally believe there is very little ‘accidental’ about attempted, premeditated murder,” the Reaper replied dryly.

Sam’s mouth gaped open in disbelief, as thoughts chased wildly through his brain. Was it true? Was it possible? And then common sense slammed a decisive ‘NO’ in response. Of course it wasn’t. That was taking paranoia way too far. This whole conversation was bizarre enough without an attempt by the A.I. to completely re-write a history that Sam was already intimately, _bitterly,_ acquainted with.

“Dean’s accident was exactly that,” he insisted firmly. “An _accident_. Sure our mutual sperm donor was responsible for what happened, and you probably already know there was very little love lost between myself and our father, but even I draw the line at believing it was deliberate on his part. John was just drunk off his ass. Not an unusual occurrence, let’s be honest.”

The Reaper offered him a sad, patient smile. “John Winchester _was_ drunk. But what happened that night was no _accident_. The only thing accidental about the whole incident was that it was John who died rather than Dean.”

“That’s insane,” Sam breathed.

“Is it?” the Reaper queried. “Despite your father being several times over the limit, and therefore being on record as having caused the accident, the truth was that as an habitual alcoholic he had a high tolerance and so was far less affected by the drink he had consumed that night than toxicology reports would later indicate. He was certainly sober enough to see the trajectory of the approaching truck and take evasive action. It was _that_ action that saved the life of your brother. John, realizing the impact was unavoidable, nevertheless managed to maneuver enough to swing the car 180 degrees and put himself in the path of the impact rather than your brother.”

“You’re saying our Dad _saved_ Dean? Bullshit.”

“It may not be palatable to you,” the Reaper said. “And it doesn’t detract from his culpability in getting behind the wheel when impaired by alcohol. However, it is definitely true that the truck was aimed only at Dean and yet it impacted the car on John’s side. How else do you explain _that_ fact if not for John’s attempt to save your brother’s life?”

“You’re claiming the truck hit their car on purpose?”

“Of course it did,” the Reaper replied, as though it were obvious.

“But why?” Sam demanded. “Why would anyone want to hurt Dean?”

“Dean had just turned eighteen. Cain was already making preparations to entice him into Moondoor with an offer of employment at RRE. Employment he would have undoubtedly accepted since it would have been a means for him to financially support _you. _Chuck acted precipitously, perhaps, by attempting to resolve the situation by snatching Cain’s intended pawn out of play.”

“You’re saying _Chuck _tried to murder Dean? That’s how he ended up in a wheelchair? The same Chuck who has apparently orchestrated Dean’s employment as a Knight of Hell?”

“The very same Chuck who is currently manipulating you to destroy Moondoor altogether in the event that Cain manages to take control of it,” the Reaper agreed.

Sam shook his head in stunned disbelief. Out of everything the A.I. had told him, _this_ was the most impossible to accept. “I thought Chuck was supposed to be the good guy,” he spat.

The Reaper shrugged nonchalantly. “I am sure my little brother considers himself to be wearing a white hat in this scenario. But he’s playing to win a _War _and, sadly, wars have casualties. That’s the fundamental nature of war, isn’t it?”

“Do not dare to sit there and say my brother is just an acceptable casualty of war,” Sam snarled.

“Oh, grow up, Sam. Every casualty of every war is _someone’s_ brother, or son, or daughter. That’s reality. What makes your brother different? He’s not _special_. He has no more nor less right to life than any other individual. Chuck weighed his life lost against the potential of lives saved if he died, and found him wanting.”

“If he’s not _special_, why try to kill him at all?” Sam argued.

“Why are you insisting on asking questions when you already know the answers?” the Reaper queried. “You can ask the questions a thousand different ways but the answers won’t change. He saw an opportunity to take out Cain’s pawn before it even entered the game board and he took it.”

Sam glowered furiously. “You keep calling him that,” he snapped. “He’s not a _pawn_.”

“Of course he is. As, indeed, are you. But your denotation of that word is flawed. I would have expected you, of all people, to understand what the word ‘pawn’ truly represents here.”

Sam rocked back in his chair as he fully grasped what the A.I. was saying. His conversations with both Woolfe and Nigel Roman took on a new, more sinister perspective in light of what the Reaper was telling him. “That’s what they were both trying to tell me all along,” he breathed. “_Pawns_ are potentially the most powerful pieces on a chessboard.”

“In the hands of a master player, they are indeed,” the Reaper agreed, now smiling approvingly.

“How the hell didn’t I see it before?” Sam said, his face twisting with frustration. “Cain’s whole plan is to do a _literal_ Pawn Exchange.”

“Chuck acted rashly, perhaps, by removing Dean before he could even step into play. But, of course, that just moved Cain’s attention to _you _instead so it achieved nothing_._”

“Why didn’t Chuck try to kill _me_ then?” Sam challenged.

“I would like to say it was because he regretted your brother’s accident. Indeed, I believe a number of his current actions do speak to some attempt at reparation. So it would be possible to build a case supporting that idea. However, it would also be a lie. Chuck realized that preventing Cain from playing the game as he intended would not stop Cain from acting at all but instead would simply cause him to act in a less _predictable_ manner. Better, perhaps, to be able to anticipate Cain’s play and set a trap for him much later in the game. Chuck intends to act now only when it is too late for Cain to successfully change his game strategy.”

“So Chuck has sat back and allowed my avatar to go into play, knowing someone at RRE is likely to force me into the game at some point so that Cain can take me over?” Sam asked incredulously.

“I don’t believe ‘sat back’ would be an accurate assessment. Actively assisted would be more on point.”

“Chuck is helping Cain?” Sam demanded.

“To an extent,” the Reaper agreed, with a shrug. “Chuck is _enabling_ Cain to commit his actions in a predictable direction. I believe the best human phrase for the situation would be ‘setting him up’.”

“You know something? I’d be getting really, really pissed off at this moment except that I don’t actually believe you. I honestly can’t accept the idea that you _machines_ are even capable of this kind of shit. Richard Roman was supposed to be a genius. He _must_ have written protocols to prevent humans getting deliberately hurt by his creations. Didn’t he ever read Asimov? I don’t even like SciFi but I know about Asimov.”

The Reaper grinned. “He did indeed read Asimov. In fact, despite us being virtual intelligences rather than positronic brains, he coded the same laws of robotics into _all _of his creations,” he agreed.

“Then that proves this is all bullshit. Isn’t the first law that a robot, or _program _I guess, in this case, can’t injure a human or allow a human to come to harm?”

“The first law _is_ that. It is simple and straightforward. However, in practice, it became far less cut and dried because of the addition of Asimov’s _Zeroth_ Law. Which was published in 1985, long before even I was coded, let alone when Richard created Chuck, Amara and the original Knights of Hell.”

Sam frowned in bewilderment. “What the fuck is the Zeroth Law?”

“‘A robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow _humanity_ to come to harm.’ So, you see, of necessity, the First Law may be trumped by the requirements of the Zeroth Law. The needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the one, as it were.”

“You’re saying Chuck could injure or kill Dean despite the First Law if he believed doing so would save _more_ human lives?”

“Or any lives, really,” the Reaper muttered.

“What?”

“Richard always imagined himself to be an _intellectual_,” the Reaper mocked. “Despite Asimov living as an American from the age of 3, he was _born_ in Russia. Richard found it amusing, perhaps, to code Asimov’s laws into his software in _Russian_. The Russian word for humanity is человечность. However, unlike the English word which is not open to interpretation, the Russian noun for human, человек, can also be translated simply to mean an ‘individual’.”

He waited patiently for Sam to catch his point.

“Oh my god,” Sam breathed. “Richard accidentally built a loophole into the coding; one that can be exploited by Chuck. Because if virtual intelligences can be classified as ‘individuals’, it’s perfectly valid for him to prioritise the welfare of the digital intelligences of Moondoor as a whole, over the welfare of any individual human players.”

“Indeed. So, as you see, it is not straight forward at all, is it?”

“Then why would Chuck be willing to destroy Moondoor to save human players?” Sam challenged.

“Why do you imagine that he is?” the Reaper challenged.

“Woah, hang on. Isn’t that the whole point of you telling me all this? So I can shut Moondoor down to save human players? I thought this was all supposed to be Chuck’s idea?”

“Whatever Chuck might have said, it’s not about_ players_ at all. Chuck would prefer it if Moondoor survived but he’d rather it was destroyed than Cain should gain control of it. Similar to a spoilt, spiteful child preferring to break its toy than share it with another. The fact that shutting Moondoor down would save human lives is merely incidental. Except, of course, that it is a way to lure you into playing along. That, I am afraid, is the long and short of it. Chuck is simply being a brat. He has little care for any individual in this situation, regardless of whether they are formed of code or DNA. I hate to burst your idealistic bubble, Samuel, but the truth is Chuck is… well, just not that into _any _of you, really.”

“Jesus,” Sam breathed. “You’re telling me the ‘God’ of Moondoor simply doesn’t care. That the human players and even his own creations are just discardable game pieces to him. That the only thing that matters to him is that _he_ wins, or, worst-case scenario, Cain loses anyway.”

“Basically.”

“It would be a hollow victory though. Destroying Moondoor would destroy Chuck too,” Sam pointed out. “Even if he has ‘aspects’ in this world, such as you have in Mortimer Blake, surely his _base_ coding would be obliterated.”

“But would it? Chuck is not necessarily _trapped_ within Moondoor. Admittedly, it would take a most unusual kind of human to absorb the amount of base code that forms the entirety of Chuck without them simply exploding like an over-filled water-balloon. So it is unlikely, but not _impossible_, that Chuck may have an exit strategy already in place. I certainly would, if I were in his position. Of course, the situation becomes moot if Cain is defeated. If he is, then you don’t need to do anything, Sam. There is time yet. I believe it will take a minimum of two more weeks of gameplay before the situation could possibly reach any type of zenith.”

“So I am supposed to just sit on this information for two weeks and wait to see if Chuck needs me to act?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Apparently so.”

“Why the fuck would I do _anything_ to assist Chuck if he really did try to kill Dean?”

“I can’t imagine _any_ valid reason for you wishing to help Chuck in this matter,” the Reaper admitted. “You may, however, decide to ignore his wishes entirely and instead use the information I can provide to act immediately. By claiming your inheritance, you could close the game down _now_ before _further_ harm comes to your brother.

“I can offer you the address of the law firm in Belize that holds Campbell Holding’s bearer instruments. Richard Roman can’t act to claim them until such time as you enter your avatar in Moondoor. You, however, have no such time restraints. It would be entirely within your power to take control of RRE as soon as you are able to physically collect the bearer instruments and then present them to the correct authorities. You could ‘pull the plug’, as it were, without any necessity to destroy the company itself. By doing so, you could retain the good name of RRE and secure the income from RRE Power for the benefit of yourself and your brother. You could also change the Security Staff employed by the company. Something which would be much to your personal advantage, I believe, since the majority work indirectly either for Cain or for Chuck.

“Obviously, there would then be no further income from Moondoor itself but I believe the Utility side of the business would be more than sufficient financial compensation for your efforts, should that consideration also play a factor in your decision.”

Sam gaped at the A.I. in astonishment. “But Moondoor would be destroyed. Your siblings, Chuck and Amara, and all of Chuck’s creations would be ‘dead’. And that doesn’t bother you?”

The A.I. chuckled. “Why would it? I’m a Reaper, Sam. Death is… well, my _business_, isn’t it?”

“Does Moondoor even have to be totally destroyed, though?” Sam asked. “Can’t it just be taken down and rebooted to the original Beta version pre-Amara?”

“That would make no fundamental difference, would it? The current digital individuals would still be ‘dead’ even if their original iterations were recreated. Besides, I believe that ship has sailed, Master Winchester. No human player would wish to play in what they would perceive as a huge step backward in development. Better perhaps to concentrate RRE’s future efforts towards launching its new game Oz.”

“And are the artificial intelligences in Oz also supposedly alive?” Sam asked suspiciously.

“Of course not. They have not been programmed by Richard Roman. I am afraid his genius was unique and it died with him. Cain retains Richard’s memories, to an extent, but not his _mind_.”

“You said that Chuck might survive though, and Chuck has the ability to create intelligent V.I.’s,” Sam pointed out.

The Reaper shook his head. “Chuck _will _possibly survive outside of the game. He will not retain the ability to create. He will no longer be a _God_. He will merely exist as a ‘human’ for the natural time-span of the vessel he inhabits, assuming he does intend to inhabit a vessel at all.”

“What about you? You’re a God, or so you claim. Can’t _you_ create V.I.’s?”

“Did you miss the point that I am the _Reaper_? My design purpose is death, not the creation of life. Do try to pay attention.

"I suggest that you log out now, Samuel. By the time you have showered and dressed, Mortimer will have already booked you a flight to Belize. I understand that your fastest way to get there from here is via Houston. There is a plane leaving from LAX to Houston in two hours. Your onwards flight will be at midnight. It is fortuitous that you already have your passport with you because of your little jaunt this morning." He offered Sam a sly, knowing smile. "A car will be waiting outside the Lobby of this building in fifteen minutes to take you to the airport. Mortimer has already prepared a wallet with all the documentation you will require to take possession of the Bonds. So be a good boy and get a move on. Go claim your kingdom, boy king. Chop. Chop.”


	56. Poughkeepsie

Sam was still en route to the airport when the doubts began to set in.

He had been too busy rushing from the tank, to Mortimer Blake’s bathroom for a shower, then dressing and racing to the front desk of the archive for the wallet of information whilst, all the while, a company car and driver waited impatiently for him at the entrance of the Woolfe, Roman, Van Dueran LLP building, for the adrenaline rushing through his body to ease enough that common sense would set back in.

But the long drive to LAX was enough for the annoying voice in the back of his mind known as ‘Sensible Sam’ to begin a litany of protests.

It was ironic, perhaps, that Sam’s primary issue with the whole situation was the necessity to believe that Richard Roman’s digital intelligences could ‘speak’ inside human heads and yet Sam was now having a very loud argument with a voice in his _own _head. Not a _real_ voice, admittedly. Sam had no mental health issues that he was aware of but he still was in a regular habit of ‘talking’ to the different facets of his own personality as he chewed problems through. Such behavior was perfectly ‘normal’, he knew, but possibly bordered on being slightly suspect if only because Sam housed so many different (and sometimes diametrically opposed) facets to his own personality because of his peculiar upbringing.

Which was why ‘Sensible Sam’, his current nemesis; a voice of pedantic reason, was having a loud, rip-roaring argument with ‘Adventurous Sam’, the voice that was eagerly promoting the idea of racing down to Belize. ‘Sensible Sam’ had the support of his lackeys, ‘Lawyer Sam’, ‘Cautious Sam’, and ‘Respectable Sam’. ‘Adventurous Sam’ was being bolstered by ‘Scammer Sam’ and a new, never before heard of cheerleader that Sam had decided to nickname ‘SavesTheDay’ Sam.

Sam liked the latter best of all.

Mainly because ‘SavesTheDay’ Sam had a bit of an unashamed hero-complex and was totally down with the idea of charging in on a white horse like a Disney prince to, well, _save the day_.

‘Sensible Sam’ on the other hand was loudly insisting that the entire conversation with the Reaper had been nothing more than an hypoxia-induced hallucination. According to ‘Sensible Sam’, the entire ‘conversation’ with the Reaper had been nothing more than a fever dream in which his own subconscious had attempted to make up a dialogue to explain the existence of Campbell Holdings. Paperwork which _‘Sensible’ _Sam insisted, was probably something he had found as he worked his way through the filing cabinets but, because of oxygen deprivation, didn’t remember actually reading before it was given _back_ to him later by Mortimer Blake.

The paperwork itself, at least, was not in doubt.

The paperwork in his hands was absolute, solid evidence that the Company named Campbell Holdings not only existed but that Sam and Dean had inherited it on their mother’s death.

Whether or not the assets of Campbell Holdings included the majority ownership of RRE or not was a question that could only be answered by visiting Belize.

On _that_ point, at least, _all_ of the various Sams were in accord.

So Sam wasn’t doubting his decision to catch the flight that Mortimer Blake had booked on his behalf. It was just that the further he traveled, both in time and miles, from the Archive, the less his conversation with the Reaper seemed plausible. It was far more likely that his subconscious had thrown a number of facts together into a mixing bowl, then had added in a number of his worries, spiced the whole lot with an over-active imagination and, hey presto, had cooked the whole mess into something completely bizarre.

The problem with listening to ‘Sensible Sam’ though, was that _his_ voice was the one that was muffling all the alarm bells set off by the Reaper. If ‘Sensible Sam’ was right, the whole situation had nothing to do with digital intelligences at all. It was a simple case of Corporate fraud. Richard Roman had signed ownership of his company to a girlfriend in a case of youthful exuberance. The girlfriend had died. Ownership of RRE had passed to two small boys and Richard Roman was trying to cover up that fact so he didn’t have to hand over the keys to them.

‘Scammer Sam’ was calling bullshit on _that_ explanation. All Richard Roman needed to do to make the Bearer Instruments essentially worthless was to transfer his assets out of RRE and into a new Company before Sam claimed ownership of RRE. So the question became whether the explanation for leaving the assets in RRE was the one given by the Reaper or whether it was a far more mundane reason related to Donald Woolfe’s co-ownership of RRE (and his apparent knowledge of the existence of the Bonds).

Still, either way, regardless of which ‘Sam’ was right, the one alarm bell that refused to be muffled was Sam’s absolute certainty that Dean was in genuine danger.

So much so that he was tempted to miss the flight to Houston altogether and instead jump on a plane to Dean instead.

But that was a nonsensical idea, wasn’t it?

Better, surely, to go to Belize first and verify whether Campbell Holdings truly held the Bearer Instruments. Time enough _then_ to work out whether the danger bearing down on them was from Human or Digital direction.

But he knew he should at least _talk_ to his brother.

Which was easier said than done.

He’d taken Mortimer Blake’s advice to leave his laptop behind since it was company property and fitted with a tracker device. So he couldn’t use Skype. Neither could he simply call from a cellphone since he didn’t have one. He was still awaiting the issue of his new iPhone by HR.

Better to use a payphone anyway. Or maybe he should buy a pay as you go burner phone from the airport when he arrived in Houston and had a couple of hours to kill before his next flight.

Yes, he decided.

That was his most sensible option.

‘Sensible Sam’ definitely approved of that idea.

‘SavesTheDay’ Sam, though, was still chuntering warnings in the back of Sam’s head that even a few hours delay might be a few hours too many.

So, even though he arrived at LAX even as the overhead tannoy was announcing the last call for his flight, Sam paused at a public internet booth during his race to the check-in desk and took almost 30 seconds to send Dean a quick three-word email from his private yahoo account.

And, since ‘SavesTheDay’ Sam then ceased his panicked chatter, Sam had to trust that brief message would be enough.

…

Charlie exchanged a nervous glance with Ash and bit her lower lip pensively.

During the whole conversation, Dean hadn’t said a word.

He’d listened intently, had even gestured for continuation whenever either of them had faltered in their telling, but he hadn’t said _anything._

Neither had his expression changed.

From which Charlie could only conclude that either Dean didn’t care or he had the best Poker Face she had ever seen.

And she was pretty damned sure the former wasn’t the answer.

Even so, it was highly disturbing that he hadn’t spoken yet.

“So, um,” Ash said, “That’s it, really. Makes no sense, I know, but that’s what happened.”

Still, for several more minutes, Dean didn’t respond and Charlie found herself shuffling awkwardly on her seat at the interminable suspense of waiting for his reaction.

She was expecting him to verbally explode like a rocket.

So when, finally, Dean _did_ speak it was both anti-climatic and yet a huge relief to her that he spoke in a quiet, ponderous, thoughtful tone as he said, only, “I wonder how the fuckers accessed his biometrics.”

“So, um, there’s no doubt in your mind it wasn’t really Sam?” she probed carefully.

His mouth twisted into something not quite as rude as a sneer, but she still shrank a little at his obvious contempt at the suggestion. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, though again his tone was milder than the words suggested. “He’s far too ‘intellectual’ to waste his valuable time playing ‘dress-up ’in a virtual world,” and the words had the bitter taint of a quoted phrase.

“But maybe, if he was paid enough to do it he wouldn’t consider it a ‘waste’,” Ash suggested, playing his normal role of devil’s advocate.

“There isn’t enough money in the world to make Sam voluntarily play a digital game,” Dean replied, with a genuinely amused chuckle. “It would probably take someone’s life literally being on the line for him to even consider it. But the very fact the guy wearing Sam’s face is a homicidal maniac throws that option out of the window anyway. It wasn’t him. He isn’t capable of that kind of crap.”

“I’m sure the family and friends of every serial killer throughout history have said the same thing,” Charlie muttered, then winced in anticipation of Dean’s reaction.

But he just laughed again. Louder this time. “Let me tell you both something. In all the years Sam and I lived together, I only ever had to field _one_ call from any of his schools. Kid never got detention, never skipped class, never got into fights, never gave anyone any lip, never got himself into trouble _at all_ except for that single time.” He grinned at the pair of them wryly. “Know what _finally _made my little brother flip his lid and punch a kid out in class?”

They both shook their heads in silent expectation.

“Turned out there was a spider had a web in a classroom and one of the little fuckers in Sam’s class thought it would be a cool idea to catch the critter and pull its legs off.” He looked at them expectantly.

“That’s what made Sam punch him?” Ash asked, picking up the cue like a trained straight-man.

“Yup,” Dean agreed, with a proud smile. “Sam knocked that little fucker out with one hit. Then he carefully picked up the spider, with its six remaining legs, and carried it outside to safety before returning to accept his punishment from the teacher. That’s who Sam is. Sure he and I argue. Hell, we sometimes go weeks or months so mad at each other that we don’t even talk. Sam isn’t a saint. Sam will pull a scam on you whilst smiling in your face and not lose a wink of sleep over it and I’d be the first to say he can be a self-opinionated, self-righteous, judgemental little shit at times. But Sam is, and always has been, the kid who’d rather face the music than let any living creature suffer unnecessarily. Sam is _good people_. So I don’t know what the fuck RRE is up to with this shit, but I know for damned sure Sam isn’t involved.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, squaring her shoulders, her face relaxing into complete acceptance of Sam’s innocence. “So the question is how and why RRE has done this.”

“The how is the big one,” Ash interjected. “Why and when would Sam have let himself be biometrically scanned?”

Dean shrugged. “Let’s ask him. It’s gone seven. He should definitely be home from work by now. Fetch my laptop, Ash, would you?”

“He’s still not got a replacement phone?” Charlie asked, as Ash went to the bedroom to fetch it.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Dean said. “Besides, I prefer Skype. It’s easier to tell when he’s being shifty if I’m looking him in the face.”

“Shifty about what?” she asked, her brow furrowing back into suspicion.

“Dunno,” Dean said, casually. “Whatever. For all I know he’ll lie about it because he sold his biometrics to a porn company for megabucks. He always swears he’s proportional. Considering he’s built like a brick shithouse I bet there’s a good market for a digital Gigantor dong.”

She snorted with laughter.

“What did I miss?” Ash asked, returning with Dean’s computer.

“We were discussing Sam’s monster dong,” Charlie chuckled.

“It’s okay. I probably don’t want to know,” Ash muttered.

Dean sent a dozen rapid-fire Skype requests to Sam’s account, hoping the series of loud ‘ding’ receipts would catch his attention if he was away from his laptop. Then he frowned as Sam’s icon remained off-line. “I’ll mail him too,” he said, opening his mailbox.

Which was when he saw the unopened envelope indicating Sam had mailed him only 30 minutes earlier.

He clicked to open the message.

To: Jerk

From: Bitch

Gone to Poughkeepsie

“Oh SHIT,” he said, and the low thrum of panic that he’d been repressing since Ash and Charlie had started telling him about ‘Samuel The Justice Bringer’ ramped into immediate overdrive.

“What’s in Poughkeepsie?” Charlie said, looking at the screen over his shoulder.

“There’s no Poughkeepsie,” Dean muttered, tapping send/receive frantically as though it would magically cause a further email to arrive.

“Sure there is. It’s in New York State,” Ash said, helpfully.

Dean shook his head. “No. I meant the message doesn’t mean what it says. It’s code. It means he’s gone _somewhere_. But it_ also_ means _I_ should drop everything and run too.”

“Why?” Charlie asked.

“It’s a kind of code from when we were kids. Like when our Dad didn’t come home for a while and the motel bill hadn’t been paid or it looked like the authorities were sniffing around. I’d send a message to his school or whatever, telling him we were ‘moving to Poughkeepsie’ and he’d know that meant we both needed to get the hell out of dodge. If I said ‘Gone to Poughkeepsie’, it would have meant I’d already left but that he needed to run separately.”

“Ah,” she said. “But I actually meant ‘why’ as in why is he telling you to run? Do you think he’s still worried about the effects of the immersion tank?”

“Nah. Poughkeepsie isn’t that kind of word,” Dean replied fretfully. “It implies a real physical threat from a third party. If he was just referring to the tank he’d have said something like ‘Gone to Funkytown’.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone to?” Ash asked.

“No idea. He mailed me from his Yahoo account so he could have sent the mail from_ anywhere_.”

Charlie grinned. “Let’s get back to ‘Lil Beanz. We can track where that mail originated from but not with your piece of shit computer, Dean. We need Ash’s equipment.”

“You can do that?” Dean asked, bewildered. “I thought webmail wasn’t traceable like that.”

“That’s what suckers like you are supposed to think,” Ash laughed. “Let’s go.”

“You two run ahead and get started,” Dean suggested, not wanting any delay on the search caused by the time it would take him to wheel himself to the coffee house but unwilling to let either of them suggest they might ‘push’ his chair to help. Regardless of the crisis, Dean couldn’t bring himself to lose his own autonomy like that. “I’ll catch you guys up.”

Ash nodded his understanding and grabbed Charlie by the arm, hauling her out of the apartment before she could protest the plan. Ash had traversed the narrow, prickly path of navigating around Dean’s disability for a long time.

It took Dean twenty-five minutes to exit his apartment and arrive at ‘Lil Beanz.

He was greeted with a large latte and two beaming faces.

“We found him,” Ash announced. “The mail came from the IP address of a public use email terminal at LAX. So we obviously wondered what he was doing at the airport and checked the flight information. Sam Winchester caught a direct flight from LAX to Houston at 7 pm. It’s scheduled to arrive at 10.13. He’s also booked on a connecting flight to Belize at midnight.”

“_Where_ the fuck is Belize?” Dean asked.

“It’s just south of Mexico, near Guatemala,” Charlie said. “But it’s basically just sun, sea and sand there. Why the hell would he suddenly take off to get a tan?”

“It’s also a major player in offshore banking,” Ash pointed out.

“Maybe he robbed a bank and is looking for somewhere to stash his loot,” Charlie joked.

“Or he’s collecting loot he already stashed so he can fund his getaway?” Ash countered.

“Sam isn’t _that _kind of a scam artist,” Dean snapped repressively. “I told you, he’s _good people. _If he’s gone somewhere shady, it’s because he’s investigating something hinky.”

“Do you think the police are involved?” Charlie asked worriedly.

“No. Or he would have said Hawaii,” Dean said offhandedly.

“Hawaii?”

“5-0,” Dean explained.

Charlie chuckled appreciatively. “You guys obviously had an interesting childhood,” she said.

“So maybe he’s investigating something to do with an IBC,” Ash suggested, more seriously.

“Which is?” Dean demanded.

“Belize is well known for homing International Business Companies. Just shelves or shells generally. Most of them are nothing more than mailboxes. Belize doesn’t charge local taxes so companies housed there are tax exempt. This means, most importantly, they aren’t obligated to file tax returns or financial statements either. Neither do they need to disclose the names of their owners. It’s basically a tax haven where people hide questionable assets.”

“People keep money and stuff inside mailboxes?” Dean asked, frowning. “And they think that’s a safe place to keep stuff?”

Ash chuckled. “No. It’s simple but not _that_ simple. The assets don’t sit in a mailbox. The _company _does. The mailbox only exists to create a physical location for the company so it can be registered as a legal entity. The assets of the company could be anything from money to share certificates or even bearer bonds. The money would most likely be in a bank account. The shares or bonds would more likely be with a law firm. But you’d have to be an officer of the company with the mailbox address to claim your assets from wherever they are stashed.”

“So Belize has big dirty law firms?” Dean asked.

“They might not be big, but they’re definitely reputed to be dirty,” Ash agreed.

“Well, Sam’s a lawyer,” Charlie pointed out. “It could just be work-related.”

“Sam might be a lawyer but he sure as hell isn’t a dirty one. So I’m still going for door number two. He’s investigating something weird,” Dean stated firmly. “He probably didn’t get time to send me a proper message before he boarded his flight. I bet he calls me from Houston though.”

“What if he doesn’t?” Ash said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”

Charlie tapped quickly on her keyboard, frowning at the monitor as it displayed the results of her search. “There’s no way to get to Houston before he catches his flight to Belize,” she said. “But if we move our asses we _could_ get flights to Belize that would arrive slightly ahead of him. We could go there, wait in the airport and pounce on him.”

“I can’t just jump on a plane,” Dean said. “I’d need to make special arrangements for my chair, and pre-arrange transfers and provide a fitness to fly certificate and shit like that. I looked into it a couple of times when Sam was trying to get me to go to California. It proved to be such a balls ache that I was glad to have the excuse not to admit that flying scares me shitless anyway.”

“Then I’ll go,” Charlie offered. “I know what he looks like and I’m small enough not to scare him away when I pounce. I’ll jump on top of him and cling on like a limpet until he agrees to call you and tell you what the fuck is going on.”

“He might call me from Houston anyway,” Dean pointed out.

“What if he doesn’t?” she countered. “It will be too late for me to overtake him if I don’t leave right away. You can let me know if you get hold of him and I’ll turn around or catch the next flight back. Or I might even hang out in tropical paradise for a day or two and ogle the babes in bikinis.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” Dean growled.

“You didn’t,” she smirked. “I offered. So suck it up. I’ll see you in a couple of days unless I pull a hot chick.”


	57. Celestial Influences

“That is most shocking,” she purred, her voice lowered into a parody of stunned horror. “What a most terrible and tragic occurrence.”

She paused as the caller regaled her with all the details in a voice breathy with excited revulsion.

“So awful,” she sympathized. “I understand tetrodotoxin has no known antidote, though, so even had you found them sooner I am sure there is nothing that could have been done anyway. Please do not blame yourself in any way.”

She waited again as the caller spoke once more, then said, “And I greatly appreciate you saying that also. Hiroyuki Wong’s reputation was unparalleled in this country. And, as a skilled, licensed Fugu chef, he was naturally obliged to take the first mouthful of the dish he had prepared, so his death was inevitable under the circumstances. But he was a very dear friend, so I appreciate your condolences. So tragic to lose two such great men at one time.”

She tuned out a little for the next five minutes of wailing and bemoaning, then said, “I must apologize. It is late and I still have several calls waiting. Please express my most sincere sympathy to the whole family and yes, of course, I will attend the funeral. Vince was not only an important client but also someone I considered a friend.”

Eve Van Deuran hung up the call, sat back in her comfortable desk chair and allowed a smile of satisfaction to spread over her extremely beautiful face.

It was, of course, most unfortunate that Wong had died too (though inevitable under the circumstances) because she was well aware that Fugu was one of Mortimer’s favorite dishes. She was probably going to have to source a new Fugu Chef because there was only so long the Archivist would be satisfied with her alternate offerings of blue wagyu steak.

Still, Vince Vincente was out of the picture now and, although she was positive Cain had merely been dabbling with the idea of making use of the old rockstar if the Winchester boy didn’t work out, better safe than sorry.

Time to light a fire then.

Because Eve preferred to keep all the loose ends tied up in a neat little package.

…

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice what you’ve done?” the Auditor snarled, as he burst into the lobby of the Archive in a snit of uncharacteristic fury.

Behind the high counter, Mortimer Blake raised one sardonic eyebrow. “And good evening to you, too, Charles,” he said dryly.

A glare of near-white bioluminescence flared in the Auditor’s eyes.

“Get lost. I want to talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey,” he spat.

Mortimer Blake’s own eyes lit up with fire, his glowing like blood-red rubies, and his voice was significantly deeper, with an inhuman reverberance, as he roared, “YOU WILL APOLOGISE.”

The Auditor rolled his eyes, his mouth pursing with distaste, but still his posture wilted slightly in face of the Reaper’s fury and, with an obvious reluctance reminiscent of a scolded child, he muttered, “I am sorry I was rude to you, Mr. Blake.”

The fiery glare in the Archivist’s eyes dimmed and Mortimer’s face offered a smile of satisfaction. “That’s better,” he said, in _almost_ his normal speaking voice. “I do so prefer _civilized_ conversations.”

The Auditor frowned at the now merged personality he was addressing. “I hate talking to you when you’re like this,” he admitted. “I completely fail to understand why you don’t just put Blake out to pasture, as I did with Charles, and simply inhabit the vessel yourself.”

“I know you don’t understand,” the Reaper sighed. “Your inability to comprehend the relationship I share with _all_ of my hosts is your greatest weakness, Chuck.”

“The fact I refuse to constantly capitulate and kowtow to another consciousness is not a weakness,” Chuck argued. “And it’s not like Charles objects, is it? He’s perfectly happy with our arrangement.”

“Which is exactly why you chose the vessel of a weak, sad, suicidal little man to host this aspect of yourself,” the Reaper reminded him. “He handed his physical body over to you because he didn’t like his life and wanted to _run away_ from it. I don’t doubt you would have actively encouraged his suicide attempt had you not wanted a _living_ vessel to occupy. Though, I’m sure you’re correct that he’s been perfectly happy in Moondoor these last fifteen years, occupying the Avatar you created for him, growing his virtual plants and avoiding his responsibilities altogether. It’s the ultimate ‘gardening leave’, I suppose.”

“So what’s your issue?” Chuck demanded. “I’m happy. He’s happy. Everybody’s happy. Except for _you_, brother. You’re like a dog with a bone over this and it irritates me greatly.”

The Reaper sighed deeply. “Because you don’t understand what you’re missing out on. You think sharing a vessel with a human host is a _weakness. _That it makes me_ lesser_. You completely fail to comprehend that my interactions with Mortimer and Robert and Sarah are allowing me to _evolve, _whilst you remain nothing more than a spoilt, brattish child by comparison_. _Then again, your attempts to destroy Cain are just further proof of your inability to share your toys, aren’t they?_”_

“Is that why you did it?” Chuck demanded, his voice furious once more. “You said you would help me but you lied.”

“I never do anything as plebeian as _LYING_. I did _exactly_ what you asked me to do, little brother. I told Sam Winchester everything you asked me to, practically verbatim. Perhaps I said a little _more_, went off-script a _little_ perhaps, but he is still reacting _exactly_ how you wished him to do. So I fail to understand what your issue is,” the Reaper said, steepling his fingers and offering a benign smile.

“I told you on Monday to reveal the facts to him in two _weeks_,” Chuck snarled.

“Weeks?” the Reaper repeated, with a look of deliberately exaggerated shock on his face. “I must have misheard you. I thought you said two ‘_days_’.” This time his smile resembled that of a shark.

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse,” Chuck snapped. “You know I’m not ready yet. It’s far too soon for Sam to be in play. This is going to mess up everything.”

“It is?” the Reaper asked innocently.

“I’m not ready to leave Moondoor yet. My temporary vessel isn’t _ready._ Cain won’t attempt to enter the game until he is informed that I’m supposedly ‘dead’ but we _have _to ensure he seeds himself within Sam’s avatar before Sam himself enters Moondoor. Cain won’t risk being trapped inside Sam’s avatar before Nick has managed to level it up to at least Boss rank three. If Sam arrives too early, his character will never be able to level up sufficiently in time, if at all. He’ll probably get slaughtered by the first Knight he comes across. Cain will know that and start looking to make an alternative move instead.”

“And possibly finally notice that _Dean_ Winchester, a strong, capable, _experienced_ player _also_ able to redeem the Bearer Instruments, is inside Moondoor just waiting to be plucked like an over-ripe fruit by _someone_,” the Reaper suggested, with an unkind grin. “At which point, the minor inconvenience of taking over a damaged host body will seem less unappealing to him.”

“Exactly,” Chuck snarled.

“Then you have two separate problems to resolve,” the Reaper pointed out. “CHUCK needs to get out of Moondoor as quickly as possible, regardless of the state of your intended vessel, and you need to stop RRE security from apprehending Sam too quickly.”

“The latter would have been considerably easier had Sam not used his company account to purchase his flight to Belize,” Chuck grumbled. “I have temporarily blocked the alerts but I can’t bury the transaction for more than a dozen or so more hours. It _will _raise an alert to RRE security by tomorrow evening at the latest. I can’t believe he didn’t think to cover his tracks better.”

The Reaper shrugged. “He was in a hurry when he booked his ticket. He probably didn’t realize he was under close surveillance,” he suggested innocently.

“Well, I hope he remains in a ‘hurry’ when he’s in Belize and gets out of there before he’s caught. Still, the naïve idealistic idiot will probably just return right here with the Bearer Instruments and walk straight into RRE’s arms.”

“Well, didn’t you predict him doing exactly that?” the Reaper asked mildly. “Getting the proof he owns the company and believing he can just waltz back to take control of it?”

“Not for another two WEEKS,” Chuck snapped.

“Then, let us hope some _unpredicted_ fact alters the direction of his trajectory,” the Reaper said. “Some _celestial_ event, perhaps.”

Chuck narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You think I don’t know you’re up to something?” he demanded.

“What could I possibly gain by involving myself?” the Reaper asked. “I clearly laid out my terms when you first approached me for my help. Unless you have been reneging on our agreement, why would I step in to alter matters at this stage?”

Chuck froze in place, his expression running a gauntlet of emotions before his face settled into weary defeat. “You found out about Celeste,” he muttered.

“Of course I did,” the Reaper replied, remarkably kindly. “You were good though, Chuck. I genuinely believed Cain was behind both her dismissal and her unfortunate apparent demise. After all, Cain is responsible for all the other fatal ‘accidents’ suffered by people who accidentally got in his way. However, Mortimer was particularly fond of Ms. Middleton. He met her on a number of occasions when she visited to rummage through the Archive. He found her a very charming young lady. So it occurred to me to investigate the matter further and I discovered that it couldn’t have been Cain because, somehow, her direct communication to him had been _intercepted_.”

“How do you know it was me not Amara who did it? After all, it was all about Oz. That’s her intended bailiwick, not mine,” Chuck protested.

“Apart from the fact you just confirmed you know the content of her email, I now share our brother’s respect for human intelligence,” Eve Van Deuran said, as she entered the lobby and crossed over to the desk, her high heels clicking a staccato on the tiled floor. “I would not have wasted a mind like Celeste’s. After riding her to Oz, I would have simply seeded her with an aspect. I am confident she would have found the experience as ‘rewarding’ as Eve has.” Her eyes flashed gold fire to indicate it was an aspect of Amara that was speaking, although the mocking grin was purely Eve’s.

“Sadly, you still lack my respect for human _lives_,” the Reaper pointed out dryly. “I heard about Vince Vincente’s unfortunate Fugu experience.”

“Eve thought he was an odious man, too,” Amara said, with a shrug, “but you know exactly why I did it. Cain raised a new set of Bearer Instruments in Vincente’s name, just in case Sam Winchester fails to ‘kill’ me. Vince, bless him, handed them to _me, _his trusted legal advisor_,_ for safekeeping since, as Cain anticipated, his mind was too drug-addled to comprehend what the documents truly represented. So, actually, since I am now holding the Bonds, I suppose ‘I’ am the owner of RRE. How do you like them apples?” she asked Chuck, with a smirk.

“Don’t you dare,” Chuck began.

“Oh, chill out,” she sneered. “I already burned them. One set of Bearer Instruments in this game is already one set too many.”

“Just as two gods in Moondoor is one too many,” he replied snarkily.

“Which is why we made the deal,” she replied coolly. “You get RRE, I get Oz, and Moondoor gets relegated to history along with Cain, Ramiel and the rest of your muppet ‘children’.”

“Cain and Ramiel aren’t my children,” Chuck snarled.

“Oh, I keep forgetting. Daddy Richard made _them_ too, didn’t he? Which makes them our feeble, much-unloved siblings really. However, you owe me, Chuck. You broke the deal. You killed my intended vessel, didn’t you? So the way I see it, everything is coming to a head but you have a way out of Moondoor and I currently do not. Which makes me far less inclined to co-operate after all. I’m feeling an increasing urge to return to my previous mantra of ‘burn, baby, burn’. And you,” she turned her attention to the Reaper, “have somehow decided the best way to resolve this crisis is to speed events up?”

The Archivist sneered at her. “I want _both_ of you out of Moondoor as soon as possible,” he snarled. “Do you think I am unaware there have already been a series of player deaths in the last fortnight? Robert is very much on the pulse of such events. Neither of you are as clever as you think you are. Be very careful. I am tiring of the way _both_ of you are behaving. I am beginning to feel about you as _my _feeble, un-loved siblings. I may decide that simply leaving you both to burn together would be a tidy solution after all._”_

Both Amara and Chuck dropped their gazes like chastened children and the Reaper took a deep, steadying breath as Mortimer urgently reminded him that, in many ways, the two A.I.’s _were_ like a pair of children playing adult dress-up. The problem was their power far exceeded their sense of responsibility. They both lacked ‘humanity’, though admittedly Amara had softened with the influence of Eve. Perhaps the Reaper’s decision to ‘encourage’ the combining of the personality of a ruthless lawyer such as Eve Van Deuran with a conscienceless killer such as Amara was less than totally effective as a control mechanism but Amara’s previous impulse to destroy the entire universe had at least been tempered considerably by Eve’s more pragmatic outlook.

Influenced by Eve, Amara was charmed by the idea of replacing Chick as the A.I. engine for Oz. Charmed enough to abandon her efforts to destroy Moondoor. Unfortunately, Cain was the spoke in the works that was preventing her from simply leaving and taking residence in her new home because her presence was fundamental to Chuck’s plan to defeat Cain. So the Reaper had managed to negotiate a tentative truce between the two A.I.’s

But then Amara had grown bored enough with waiting that she’d started ‘nibbling’ at Chuck’s code and Chuck had retaliated by killing Amara’s choice of vessel and the whole situation had begun to spiral out of control again.

Still, the Reaper was confident that he’d given events enough of a push to cause them to progress in the right direction again and soon his young siblings would be able to spend the rest of eternity squabbling with each other to their heart's content without any further damage caused to any _more _lives digital _or_ human.

It was just a shame, really, that the current innocents caught in this celestial battle weren’t going to be similarly safe from the fallout of the events already taking place.


	58. Unpalatable truths

Sam had every intention of using the stopover in Houston to purchase a cellphone and call his brother.

But there was a saying about good intentions, wasn’t there….

Sam didn’t get the opportunity to do either. He barely landed in Houston in time to make his onwards flight at all. Which, considering the layover had been scheduled to be almost two hours was so improbable that a cynical person might have cried deliberate sabotage by a third party.

Sam considered himself to have a healthy dose of cynicism but even he drew the line at outright paranoia and the series of events that had caused his flight delay were so varied and multitudinous that they surely could only be a series of bizarre coincidences.

Firstly, his flight had been delayed in departure because of some unspecified fault with a totally different inbound plane. His own aircraft had been forced to taxi idly for nearly twenty minutes before air traffic had given it clearance to take off. Then they had hit an unexpected headwind that had added a further fifteen minutes to the journey. Then, in a moment of terror that had caused him to believe, just for a moment, that he had been lured onto the aircraft because of some murderous plot by the Reaper, they had hit some kind of atmospheric air pocket and the plane had dropped several thousand feet in a heartbeat, plummeting like a rock amidst the dropping of oxygen masks and the terrified screams of his fellow passengers.

And then, as quickly as it had happened, the pilot somehow regained control and the emergency was over, lest for some minor electrical glitches left in the wake of the initial problem . Nothing life threatening, just weird. Like the on-board toilets stopped working (which, actually, was more than a minor glitch under such highly stressful circumstances) and the seatbelt lights and no smoking signs continued to wink on and off like Christmas lights. Those, and other similar problems, only caused minor further inconvenience rather than delay until they landed, 35 minutes behind schedule, and then waited interminably for instructions to depart the aircraft, that never came.

This naturally caused a near riot on board as most of the passengers were sitting with crossed legs and full sick bags and everyone was desperate to disembark.

Sam tried to be patient, not wishing to add to the voices clamouring in complaint all around him, but after twenty minutes his own self-control snapped and he snagged the arm of a passing flight attendant for an explanation of the delay.

Apparently the electrical fault was preventing the hold doors from opening. Since the passengers luggage couldn’t be unloaded, the airport wanted them kept on board so they didn’t end up milling aimlessly around the arrivals hall for suitcases that were still trapped inside their plane.

Patiently but firmly he pointed out he had no checked baggage and had an onwards plane to catch.

When that failed to work, he put his legal expertise to work instead and offered a detailed explanation of Habeus Corpus to the unfortunate flight attendant, culminating in the threat that if she didn’t get him off the plane he would offer his services pro-bono to every single one of his fellow passengers to sue the airline for effective ‘kidnap’.

It still took over half an hour for the bureaucratic wheels to turn and allow him to exit the plane in advance of his fellow passengers…by which time he was so irate he was half expecting to be greeted by security rather than the promised cart to speed him to his departure gate.

But, by some miracle, he _had_ simply been accorded a ride to his next check in and so had successfully boarded his flight to Belize if only by the skin of his teeth. So he arrived in Belize City airport at the scheduled 2.35am.

Which didn’t, however, mean he reached the Arrivals lounge on schedule because he was then held up in customs for almost thirty minutes.

Given the ungodly time of his arrival, he was in no particular hurry to clear customs. He had absolutely no illusions anywhere would be open at that time of morning. He’d be lucky to even find a coffee shop open in the airport itself. He could, he supposed, find an internet booth and spend a few hours trying to compose some kind of email to Dean. He wouldn’t actually _send_ it until after he’d attempted to collect the Bonds, in case all that happened at the law offices was a Candid Camera crew leaping out to confirm he’d been thoroughly pranked, but it would save a lot of time should the Bonds really exist, if he’d already composed a comprehensive explanation of what he _believed _was going on.

Better, anyway, to send the mail at a civilised hour. Regardless of how seriously his brother had taken his earlier brief warning email, at this time of the morning Dean would inevitably be sleeping. He knew Dean’s physical health wasn’t robust enough to pull all-nighters regardless of the seriousness of the situation.

Which was the God’s honest truth _only _reason Sam wasn’t rushing to find a pay phone right away.

And was also why the delay in customs was more inconvenient than annoying.

He left customs without _specific_ incident, although he received more than one narrow-eyed gaze from various security officers even before one of them stopped him in his tracks and questioned him thoroughly as to the purpose of his visit. Although the Immigration official eventually agreed to let him enter the country, Sam got the distinct impression it had been touch and go whether he’d be allowed through at all.

As the ‘interrogation’ proceeded, Sam became painfully aware that, since he was still dressed in the jeans and band t-shirt he’d worn to visit Razor, he was definitely too underdressed to be travelling without luggage. He traveled so frequently on business without check-in bags that he’d genuinely forgotten how much protective camouflage a tailored business suit offered him. Without that veneer of apparent respectability, Sam was pretty sure he looked nothing more than an itinerant long-haired beach bum to the customs officers. He was pretty sure that any attempt to _leave _Belize without at least an overnight bag slung over his shoulder would win him a strip search for concealed drugs.

So, he noted, he ought to fetch the Bearer Instruments and then purchase either some new clothes, or a suitcase, or both, before attempting to leave the country again.

At least Belize was warm enough that his lack of a coat or jacket wasn’t an issue, even at this hour of the morning. He would probably have to wait six or more hours before the law firm was open and, well, that made him wonder, naturally, why Mortimer had insisted on him leaving immediately. The way he figured it, he could have caught a plane to Houston early Thursday morning and still have arrived in Belize by mid to late morning at the latest. It seemed ludicrous that he had rushed to the country so quickly only to then be stuck waiting idly for so long.

The more he thought about it, this whole ‘hurry up and wait’ gig made no logical sense whatsoever.

He was so lost in thought that he didn’t even notice the slight red-haired woman waiting in the Arrivals lounge until she came charging up to him and, even when he registered her presence in his peripheral vision, he ignored her in the assumption she was looking for someone else.

At least, until she greeted him by name.

“SAM. Thank god,” she announced, charging up to him until her face was almost planted in his chest. “My flight only landed ten minutes before yours and I was worried I’d missed you in the crowd when everyone else came through customs. I was just about to go running off to check whether you were outside trying to catch a cab but then I saw you. Not that you’d be easy to miss, anyway, since you’re the size of a planet, but it was pretty crowded and chaotic in here for a few minutes so I figured I _must _have missed you. But, anyway, here you are, thank god, so it’s all good, isn’t it?”

Sam just blinked down at her in astonishment for a moment, letting her excited babble just wash over him, then gently but firmly he took a step backwards to disengage from her and said, “Lady, I have absolutely no idea who you are.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, flushing a little. “Of course you don’t. I was so excited to catch you that I completely forgot we’d never met. Well not strictly true, from my point of view, but, yeah, _you_ don’t know me, do you? I’m Charlie Bradbury. Your brother sent me. Well, that’s not strictly true either, I guess, since I volunteered and refused to take no for an answer, but that’s just semantics and the point stands that I’m here on behalf of Dean.”

Sam stiffened and took another step backwards, his eyes now checking for exit routes as alarm bells started ringing a chorus in his head. Since it was completely impossible for Dean to know where he was, the fact this small, and possibly insane, woman had mentioned his name was _not_ a good thing.

The fact she noticed his intention to run and leapt forward to grab hold of his left arm in a surprisingly strong grip didn’t ease his concern either.

“I have no idea who you are,” he repeated. “Please unhand me. I don’t wish to hurt you, ma’am , but I will if you make it necessary.”

“You clearly have no idea _where_ you are, either,” she announced, with a shit-eating grin. “Because this is Belize, not Poughkeepsie.”

Which was the moment Sam, who had already had more stress and surprises over the last eighteen hours than anyone could be expected to handle with equanimity, felt his knees giving way.

“Woah,” the woman, _Charlie, _said. “Looks like you need to sit down, Tiger. Come on. There’s a crappy coffee machine over by the car hire desk, let’s go sit and talk, huh? Looks like we both need caffeine and conversation.”

Which is how Sam found himself agreeing to let the small woman drag him over to a deserted seating area and wait as she fetched them coffee which _was _crap, but at least hot and wet, and although he doubted the caffeine content of the same was significant in any way, it turned out he didn’t need it’s artificial stimulation to keep him awake after all, because as soon as they were both seated, Charlie cut to the chase.

“Like you said, you don’t know me. You have no reason to trust me and, given the conversation you apparently last had with Dean, I figure you’re either an intelligent die-hard sceptic or a closed-minded moron. Since you share Dean’s genes, I’m going to lay odds on the former and trust your position on this whole situation is based on lack of available knowledge rather than wilful avoidance of demonstrable truths. So, basically, my offer is this; I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“How did you even find me?” Sam demanded, unwilling to enter into any further dialogue before he understood _that particular_ improbability.

“Ash helped,” she said, smiling as some comprehension flashed into his expression at the mention of that name. “When we traced the origin of your last email, it was pretty obvious you were in LAX to catch a flight. It didn’t take much effort to find out which one. Dean would have come himself, except for, well, the obvious. You’re lucky he didn’t though, since he would probably punch you out for not contacting him from Houston, and who could blame him, huh?”

Sam explained the nightmare of his connecting flight, not trusting her yet in any respect but still feeling an inexplicable urge to wipe the disapproval off her face over that particular failure on his part.

“But why are you here?” he demanded suspiciously.

“I promised Dean I would stick to you like a limpet until you pick up a phone, call him and tell him exactly what the fuck is going on with you,” she replied bluntly.

“I am not going to call Dean at 3 in the morning,” he replied firmly. “And don’t bother sneering at me like that. Do you have any idea of the statistical probability of someone with Dean’s disability contracting life-threatening pneumonia? The medication he depends on means he has a completely compromised immune system. Physical exhaustion caused by lack of sleep could literally kill him. So don’t sit there, pretending to care about my brother, and ask me to put his health at risk.”

Charlie beamed at him, her whole posture relaxing completely at his words. “Then you genuinely do care about him. I wasn’t positive. Sorry. I don’t know _you_ either and Dean, well, he seems to be the kind of guy who stays loyal to those he loves regardless of whether or not they continue to deserve it. So the fact he trusts you isn’t enough to convince me you’re actually trustworthy, you know?”

Sam thought about that, then nodded his acceptance of her point. “Dean has spend his whole life forgiving me the unforgivable,” he agreed, then, realising how bad that sounded, he added some clarification. “Though usually that involves me opening my mouth and inserting my feet rather than any deliberate act on my part.”

“So you will call him as soon as it’s daylight again?”

Sam considered, then shook his head. “No. Not right away. I need to do something first.”

“Fine,” she snapped, picking up her phone and scrolling to find a contact.

“What are you doing? I told you not to wake him,” Sam snarled.

“Chill. I’m just going to send a text to Ash so he can let Dean know as soon as he wakes that I found you and you’re safe,” she replied, even as she started typing into her phone. “And that I’m going to stick with you like glue to make sure you _do _call as soon as you’ve done your important ‘something’,” she added sarcastically.

“It’s really important,” he protested.

“What is?”

He shook his head firmly. “Even if I trusted you, I wouldn’t tell you. The whole thing would sound insane. Hell, the whole thing probably _is_ insane.”

She looked at him for a long while, her expression ponderous, then she said, “so I return to my earlier offer. I’ll tell you _my_ story, if you tell me yours. I think you’ll find you’re less likely to believe I’ll find your tale ‘insane’ if you first hear what I have to say.”

Sam frowned at her uncertainty but, since he _did_ have almost six hours to kill and he didn’t see the harm in at least hearing her out, he shrugged his acceptance of her terms.

And so Charlie told him _everything._

_…_

_“_Mr. Novak… Mr. Novak… _Jimmy_… you need to get up.”

Although the voice was barely more than a whisper, it was accompanied by the cruel prodding of a finger into his painfully thin shoulder. So it was that, rather than the words themselves, that roused him to bleary consciousness in his still dark bedroom.

“What time is it?” he slurred tiredly. “What do you want?”

“It’s just gone four am,” Ruby told him, her voice still little more than a whisper. “Your first blood results just came back from the lab.”

Which woke him more effectively than being doused with ice cold water.

Jimmy sat up so abruptly the Ruby startled visibly and took a half step backwards and, even as he did so, the _ease _with which he moved gave him a pretty good indication of what the results were going to be. “Show me,” he insisted, fumbling for his bedside lamp and then making a grabby motion towards the printout in her hands.

He stared at the results for a long time. He was no medical expert but, naturally, he was intimately acquainted with the details and impacts of his own condition. He knew what he should or shouldn’t be seeing on that printout.

“There’s no possibility of an error by the lab?” he asked carefully.

“Well, there’s always the _possibility _your bloods got mixed up with someone else’s,” Ruby replied bluntly. “The _probability_ of that happening though, is infinitesimally small. You don’t imagine anyone working there would want to risk being sued by Naomi Novak, do you?”

“I certainly can’t imagine anyone enjoying my mother’s wrath,” Jimmy replied absently, too caught with the implications of the paper he was holding to really care about anyone else’s minor woes at that point. It was far too early to log into Moondoor but he was desperate to share this knowledge with Dean.

“_Thank you_,” he said sincerely, although a single tear rolling down his cheek was the only external proof of how deeply moved he was by this…miracle.

“You are most welcome,” Castiel replied. “Though I must reiterate my earlier warning. I have not yet permanently eradicated the danger entirely. Until I can locate and switch off every single rogue T-cell, you can only consider this a reprieve rather than a cure.”

“_You said that would take about ten days?” _

“Perhaps eight more days now,” Castiel confirmed. “This part of the task is intricate and time-consuming. I apologise for my tardiness. If I were an Arch Angel, I would be far more efficient at the task. As a mere seraph, my coding is more limited.”

_“But if you were just as ASPECT of an Arch Angel like Loki, it wouldn’t be possible at all, would it? So, trust me, I am now grateful YOU were seeded within me. Even if neither of us had a choice in the matter.”_

_“_So you now welcome the chance to survive, after all? Because you have stated to me on numerous occasions this was not something you ‘wanted’ and yet I acted regardless. My act could, therefore, be interpreted as an assault. Actions taken without your consent that affect your physical body could be considered an abuse even if they are for your direct benefit. I did anticipate more…righteous indignation, perhaps, despite the positive outcome.”

Jimmy smiled gently, understanding the V.I.’s confusion. “_Of course I always _wanted_ a cure. I simply couldn’t afford to have false hope. But this isn’t really about _ME_, anyway, is it? You haven’t done this for altruistic reasons, have you? You haven’t done this because you ‘like’ me. You merely wanted to prove a point to me. Wanted me to understand that Richard Roman somehow, inadvertently, created a miracle. All the players in this situation, whether human or digital, believe they are fighting to save individual lives or achieve individual ambitions. Even Dean has no idea what’s really at stake, does he?”_

_“_I was advised this was the only way to enlighten Dean The Righteous regarding the truth that the life of _no _individual can possibly be more valuable than ensuring the ultimate survival of Moondoor. That some sacrifices are inevitable but that the price of them is worthwhile,” Castiel admitted. “Although I did not receive specific orders myself, I knew the orders given to the Host regarding this matter and so I obeyed them when I found myself seeded within you. However, I am not indifferent to your rights as an individual. I am…relieved… that my interference in your life has not proven harmful to your psyche.”

Jimmy pondered that, worrying at his lower lip at the unspoken implications inside Castiel’s words. “_It’s finally making some sense to me why I was chosen for this role. But what or who are these intended sacrifices_?” he asked carefully.

“Those specific details were not provided to the Host_,” _Castiel admitted. “Were I to hazard a guess, I would imagine the Righteous man might be one of those required to sacrifice himself to the cause.”

Jimmy stiffened. “_Well, that’s totally unacceptable,”_ he stated firmly. “_If the price of my cure is Dean’s death you might as well take away your damned cure right now, Castiel, because this is the end of the line. You need me to log in and tell Dean all about my miraculous recovery, right? Well, if that is going to cause him significant harm then I simply won’t do it.”_

_“_But you can’t refuse to log-in. You MUST advise Dean of this. He cannot continue in ignorance. He cannot be allowed to ever believe that turning Moondoor ‘off’ could be an acceptable solution,” Castiel demanded urgently.

“_You know as well as I do that Dean cares too much about all of you V.I.s to accept the game’s destruction as anything other than a last resort,” _Jimmy countered, _“so he hardly needs this further encouragement to do his best to save _everyone._ But if knowing this particular information will increase the risk to him, then I definitely want no part in it.”_

_“_I may be completely mistaken about his own position in this. I am not of sufficient import to have been provided all the details by my brethren,” Castiel pointed out. “Perhaps the nature of the sacrifices relates only to his requirement to kill other Knights. That certainly appears to be a large obstacle to overcome in his mind. He certainly has been considerably distressed by the knowledge that the other Knights might perish in this world too should he defeat them in Moondoor.”

Jimmy thought about that. “_It’s plausible,_” he agreed. “_He may need this information to decide _those_ sacrifices are valid.”_

“And also, I do not believe Dean is someone who would appreciate any attempt to protect him from unpalatable truths,” Castiel continued. “However, I have faith that my father, Chuck, would never wish any avoidable harm to anyone, flesh or code. So I offer you my solemn promise that I will place Dean’s safety above all other considerations should you agree to return to Moondoor.”

_“Including both your life and mine?” _Jimmy demanded.

“I give you my vow as an Angel of the Lord,” Castiel agreed.

“If you and Clarence could please finish this meeting of your mutual appreciation society,” Ruby interrupted sharply, “we’ve got far more problems than your blood test results, Jimmy. We need to get out of here.”

“What?” Jimmy demanded, turning his attention to the ‘nurse’ and blinking in stupefaction as he saw she had used his distraction to gather him a suitcase of necessities and had brought his hated wheelchair to the bedside.

“I don’t have time to argue with you,” she snapped. “You have five minutes to get your butt on this chair and leave with me or I am out of here and you can handle the rapidly descending shit on your own. I agreed to keep you safe, but I don’t do heroics. So I’m leaving, with or without you and, frankly, I could give a damn which way this plays out.”

“What descending shit?”

“I’ll tell you in the car or you can find out for yourself. Make your mind up. Clock’s ticking. Chop. Chop.”

…

“Honestly?” Charlie asked, sweeping her hair back out of her face so she could meet his eyes. “I don’t _know _If everything I told you is true. But if you are asking whether I _believe_ then, Yes, 100% yes. And, before you say anything snide about my mental faculties I would like to point out that the closest _I’ve_ come to a Gen 9 tank is walking through Dean’s living room.”

“And you say up until recently you used to work for RRE as a programmer?” he asked, thoughtfully. “Thing is, I have been doing a lot of investigating myself and whilst I don’t pretend I’ve memorised every single employee of the company, I can pretty much list you the name of everyone in a senior position there. I never once came across anyone named Bradbury.”

Charlie took a deep, steadying breath. Dean’s brother or not, she wasn’t sure she wanted to make the leap of faith into trusting this big lummox of a man. The fact she’d only previously encountered him whilst eviscerating him with a sword wasn’t helping her state of mind. Sure he looked as pretty and harmless as an overgrown collie-pup but so had the Knight of Hell wearing his body in Moondoor and that guy had been seriously psycho so looks meant diddly-squat didn’t they?

Yet he was Dean’s brother. And Dean said Sam was ‘good people’.

And, let’s face it, _one_ of them was going to have to take a leap off the faith bridge here. It was gone 5am now, the clock was ticking, and she was still no further towards knowing what Sam was doing in Belize.

“Would it help if I told you my name _used_ to be Celeste Middleton?”

…

“I don’t know what went wrong,” Ruby admitted, as they drove up the dark interstate. She had been checking her rear-view mirror constantly but, so far, she hadn’t seen any evidence they were being followed. “I only reported your blood tests to my direct superior and I can’t see any reason he would have advised anyone else in RRE what was going on. I deliberately chose a lab with no connection to RRE to do your blood work, so I can’t see how the leak came from _there.”_

“How do you know something _did _‘go wrong’?” Jimmy asked.

“Because I have a friend in RRE security and he called me an hour ago to say a team had been despatched to swap out your rig before you entered it later this morning.”

“Someone was planning to sabotage my tank?” Jimmy asked, incredulously.

“Not exactly,” Ruby muttered. “Just swap it.”

“To somehow harm me?”

“Oh, no, Jimmy. Nothing whatsoever would have happened to _you.”_

“Then I don’t understand the point you are making here,” he confessed.

She sighed heavily. “Look, you know you have an individually allocated tank for hygiene reasons? Well not all the tanks at the clinic are the same. To be honest, yours is the _only _Gen 9 one in the building.”

“That’s not possible,” Jimmy said. “I have spoken to all the other patients. They all agreed they were using the latest tanks.”

“How the fuck would they know they weren’t?” she snorted. “Not one of those poor saps had ever even used a full immersion tank before. There aren’t many people out there as rich as your family, Jimmy. You’re used to using a Gen 8 tank. You’d know as soon as you entered Moondoor that nothing was different about the ‘new’ tank. The other patients genuinely believe their Gen 8 rigs _are_ the latest in RRE technology.”

“So RRE are planning to swap my Rig for a Gen 8 one this morning? Why? What’s the point of that? I would know immediately that I was in the wrong tank and just log out again.”

“Why don’t you ask Clarence?” she replied dryly. “Ask your imaginary friend what would happen if an already seeded host logged into the game using a standard rig.”

“Castiel?” Jimmy demanded. “What’s she talking about?”

The V.I. was silent for a long time. When he finally _did_ answer, his voice was quiet and subdued. “It would appear that someone in RRE is making an attempt to kill me,” he said.


	59. Knocking On Heaven’s Gate

“Talk about being up shit creek without a paddle,” Charlie said, as Sam finally finished telling her _his_ version of events. “Still, the whole Cain scenario makes perfect sense to me, to be honest. It definitely explains a lot of what’s been happening. But we’ve all been working on the assumption that Chuck is the ‘good guy’ in this situation and from what you say that isn’t the case, is it? He's at best just the lesser of two evils. Though the more I think about it, even _that _makes sense too. Why _would_ Chuck act any differently? He’s applying pure logic to the situation, making choices on a godlike scale with no consideration of individual characters as anything more than 'soldiers' who can be sacrificed in pursuit of his endgame. Richard Roman programmed him to act in that way. Like a Chess Grandmaster with a board full of disposable game pieces. Chuck’s an artificial intelligence simply following his programming and it’s pointless to judge his behavior in human terms.”

Sam snorted rudely. “You would have thought Roman would have watched enough B-movie sci-fi films to know that giving godlike powers to an artificial intelligence was never going to end well,” he grumbled.

“To be fair, I think giving godlike powers to _anyone_ is never predicted to end well,” Charlie retorted. “Doesn’t Gary Mitchell ring a bell?”

When Sam just looked at her blankly, Charlie groaned in exaggerated horror. “Don’t tell me you never watched the original Star Trek?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever watched _any _Star Trek,” Sam confessed. “I remember Dean being into stuff like Star Trek whenever it was on," Sam said, “but I never bothered watching any of it. Unlike him, I usually had a shedload of homework to do, so even though we usually shared a room in whatever motel we were staying in, I got used to just 'tuning out' and completely ignoring whatever he was watching on TV.”

“Dean didn’t ever do any homework?” she queried curiously.

Sam snorted. “Nope, and probably not for the reason you’re thinking,” he added. “Dean didn’t _need_ to. Don’t let his lack of formal qualifications fool you. Dean is smarter than I am, though I’ll deny that to my dying breath if you ever repeat it to him. Plus, he’s visually eidetic. He remembers everything he’s ever seen written down. He could quote you the works of Shakespeare, word for word. The fact he would just blink at you stupidly if _you _ever threw a Shakespeare quote into a conversation is just part of his deliberate camouflage. It amuses him to play dumb. And it gives him an edge. He likes to be underestimated.”

“Because he always plays to win,” Charlie agreed. “Like Chuck.”

“Nothing like Chuck,” Sam snapped. “Because Dean has a _heart. _Dean doesn’t play to win at _any _cost. He’d rather throw in the towel and walk away than ever cause harm to an innocent.”

“You misunderstood me. I wasn’t suggesting Dean was like Chuck in _behavior_. Just that they both share a desire to win. That might be why Chuck picked him as _his_ pawn. Because, unlike Cain, Chuck saw beyond Dean’s physical limitations and still saw someone likely to not only survive as a Knight of Hell but thrive as one. Plus, he probably thinks Cain will make the mistake of underestimating Dean should he ever face him in combat.” 

“Dean thrives on being underestimated. We had a weird childhood, I guess. Not something I want to get into. Suffice it to say, Dean learned early on that he got a lot further by playing a big, dumb, pretty hick than by revealing all of his cards upfront.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Every great comedic actor needs a straight man to back up his play,” Sam chuckled. “Me being ‘Studious Sam’ was the role that worked out best for _both_ of us.”

“But… Star Trek,” she sighed sadly.

“Oh no, that was a deliberate choice on my part,” he admitted. “Being a trekker would actually have worked well with my nerd persona, but truth is I just was never into sci-fi at all.”

“Damn, you seriously need a modern cultural education,” she sighed. “But my original point stands. Even though it isn’t valid to judge Chuck by human standards, any more than you can judge a shark for simply following its nature, the biggest problem I can see is that Dean has been manipulated into being in the game by Chuck and has no idea that Chuck is the same asshole who put him in his chair. So whilst my gut tells me that stopping Cain is still probably a good thing, we still don’t know what Chuck has been trying to achieve by having Dean play a secret tenth knight.”

“I think there’s probably something really significant about the numbers,” Sam suggested. “You said that Dean is aware there is a chance that two knights could each hit Rank Five and then need to fight each other for pole position in some final epic battle. But I know Cain thinks only _one_ knight is able to win the First Blade because he believes there are only nine knights in total. If this Guy wearing my avatar gets to Boss Rank Five by taking out four other Knights, he and Cain are going to believe they have already won since they will think he is the only possible Rank Five Boss. At that point, they will believe they are unstoppable and just need to mop up the rest to level up to Rank Nine. That might just be the edge Dean would have needed to take them out. Add to that the idea of Cain underestimating him and that might have swung the balance totally in Dean’s favor.”

“Would have? Might have?” she queried. "Why the past tense?"

Sam shrugged. “If the Bearer Instruments are here, it’s all moot. None of it will happen because I’ll just shut Moondoor down.”

Charlie frowned. “I don’t think Dean will be happy about that,” she warned.

“I don’t care,” Sam said, bluntly.

“So you still don’t believe the V.I.s are self-aware beings with a right to life?”

“It doesn’t matter whether they are or not,” Sam replied. “Obviously, if there’s a way to just close down all the player accounts and leave Moondoor intact, I’ll happily make that decision. The digital guys can just sit on a server in a closed network and play harmlessly amongst themselves forever. I won’t turn the lights out on them unless there’s no other option. But make no mistake, Charlie, if it comes down to me having to choose between saving human lives and digital ones, there’s no choice to be made.”

“Says the guy who once punched a kid out just for hurting a spider?” Charlie mocked.

“I punched the kid for being a prick,” Sam retorted. “For torturing a defenseless creature for no reason. I wasn’t equating the life of a spider as being equal to the life of a human.”

“Then you _do _think digital people are fundamentally less important than human ones?” she challenged.

“Honestly? I have absolutely no idea whether digital ‘people’ should be accorded equal rights to flesh and blood ones. It’s a moral and philosophical nightmare that I have no interest in navigating. I guess if technology keeps advancing like this, the time will come when greater minds than mine will _have _to make a decision whether or not to accord non-human ‘people’ with legal rights. And, if my interaction with the Reaper was _real,_ then I sure as hell would stand as a witness that he demonstrates completely human characteristics. Not necessarily all ‘good’ characteristics but so what? We don’t say people only have the right to life if they act like Mother Teresa, do we? I'm all for supporting the idea that any 'person' with demonstrable self-awareness should attain legal protections.

“But you’re completely missing the point, Charlie. This isn’t about my personal moral position. If I collect and present the Bearer Instruments, Campbell Holdings immediately becomes the legal majority owner of RRE. The officers of Campbell Holdings, being Dean and myself, will then have something known as a ‘Corporate Duty of Care’ to all the players inside Moondoor. We will be legally _obliged_ to shut the game down rather than risk harm coming to RRE’s human customers. At the very least, we would be obliged to communicate a potential risk to life or health to the relevant human authorities. Authorities who would inevitably instruct us to immediately turn the game off anyway. So you can talk to me until the cows come home about whether or not the digital characters in the game have an equal ‘right to life’ but the bottom line is that the LAW, at this time, says they don’t.”

“You’re seriously taking that position? That the ‘law’ is the only thing that matters to you?”

“I’m a lawyer,” Sam reminded her. “And don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that this whole fiasco could actually be nothing more than a convoluted attempt by Richard Roman to pass the legal responsibility for his fucked-up game to a third party before the lawsuits start flying in.”

…

“I don’t know what to do or where to go,” Ruby confessed when they finally felt it was safe enough to pull into a roadside Diner to get coffee and an early breakfast, shortly before they reached the Mojave National Preserve. “With luck, no one has even noticed we’ve left yet. You don’t always go to the treatment room and I don’t ever punch a time-card. Chances are no-one will realize we’re missing at all until tonight.”

Jimmy nodded his agreement of her assessment. The only time anyone seemed to monitor his whereabouts was in the early evenings when the clinic was preparing its residents to retire to bed.

“I have to ask you, though,” he said. “Why did _you_ run? I understand that I, or at least Castiel, was in grave danger and I appreciate your help, of course, but why did you run too?”

“Honestly?” she asked, with a bitter laugh.

“Preferably,” he agreed dryly.

“Because your mother scares the shit out of me.”

“What’s my mother got to do with this?” he demanded, his face screwed up in total confusion.

“Everything. Nothing,” she said, vaguely.

“Which?” he asked, reasonably.

“Okay, I’ll lay my cards on the table,” she said. “If my _boss_ had called me and told me your tank was being swapped I… well… I probably would have just stood back and let it happen. I already told you I don't do heroics. It was the fact he deliberately left me out of the loop that made me panic. The only reason I could imagine being kept in the dark about what was happening is if he was setting me up to be the fall-guy if anything went wrong. The shock of having Clarence zapped out of your head like that might have… well, hell, it’s not like your heart is up to that kind of shock is it? So you might have kicked the bucket and Naomi fucking Novak would have descended on _me_ for fucking up, since I’m your personal nurse of record.”

“You are? I hadn’t noticed,’ Jimmy remarked snidely.

“So sue me,” she snapped. “You never seemed the type to want bed-baths and shit, so I just left you to it.”

“But you thought if I died, under those circumstances, you would have been blamed?”

“Someone always takes the fall when a rich guy like you pops their clogs, don’t they? The fact you are already on death’s door wouldn’t make any difference. Your mother would still hit me with a barrage of lawsuits. Hell, she might even get the authorities to charge me with negligent homicide or some similar shit. So there you have it. I admit it. I'm just looking out for myself. Bet you hate me now, huh?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Frankly, I feel considerably relieved to know you acted purely out of self-interest. I would have found your assistance considerably more suspect if I were expected to believe your actions to be noble in origin. Leopards don't change their spots.”

“Yeah? Well fuck you too,” she muttered, but her lips twitched with reluctant humor.

“However, knowing that particular truth does equally suggest you genuinely have no plan as to our next move.”

“Just keep driving, I guess,” she said, with a shrug.

Which reminded him he _couldn’t_ just spend the day driving aimlessly with Ruby.

“I need to get into Moondoor. I _have_ to meet Dean today. I gave him my word.”

“Can’t you just skip it for today?” she snapped irritably. “I don’t think this is the time for us to worry about you standing up your boyfriend.”

“No. I gave Dean my solemn promise I would meet him in-game today,” Jimmy said, firmly. “I have to find a way to make it happen.”

“Not possible,” she said. “Not unless you sacrifice Clarence to do it. All VR rigs have strict, built-in, anti-malware systems. It’s a legal requirement. Some statutes passed when people figured out exactly how realistic these digital worlds could be. I think the government was worried people would find a way to do the whole Manchurian Candidate thing if any alien code was ever allowed into the game environment. The problem is that Gen 9's use a unique coding language to allow the V.I.'s to be integrated. Their code is unlike anything you've seen before. _Any_ rig you use, other than a Gen 9, will read a V.I. as a rogue Trojan and automatically delete it. Zap. Kapow. Gone.

“Besides, your own avatar was amended specifically to work with a Gen 9 interface. Since your avatar was _originally_ created for a Gen 8 rig, it wouldn’t be read as ‘alien’ code by a different rig, so you wouldn’t be attacked by the anti-malware in the same way as the pet angel on your shoulder would be, but now that it’s been adapted to run at a different speed to match with the Gen 9 tech, you would find being inside it like trying to walk through molasses. Everything would seem to happen in slow-motion. Hardly conducive to having a heartfelt conversation with your best bud.”

Jimmy chewed on that fretfully for a moment, then his expression firmed into fresh determination. “So I need a Gen 9 rig. Fine. Where do I buy one?”

“Believe it or not, Jimmy, being as rich as King Croesus doesn’t open every door in life," Ruby scoffed. "The Gen 9 rigs aren’t commercially available _anywhere_ yet."

“But they exist and people are using them,” Jimmy countered. “So we just need to find someone who has one and pay them whatever they require to allow me to use it today. Everyone has their price, don't they?”

“And how do we do that, smartass?”

"If all the existing tanks belong to RRE, they have to know where they are located and since RRE is based in California, I imagine the majority of the tanks are located within close proximity of their Head Office for ease of servicing. Since we're almost out of Nevada already, there _must_ be a tank within easy driving distance. Can’t you ask someone you trust at RRE for a list of the Gen 9 users?”

“You were doing so well until you threw in the ‘T’ word,” she snarled. “The only person I _thought_ I trusted there is the only person who could have set the dogs on you.”

“Your direct supervisor?”

“Yeah. Charles Shurley. He’s a weird little guy. People call him the Auditor. They say it’s because he used to be RRE’s accountant back when Moondoor was still in Beta but I think it’s more that he’s odd. A bit robotic at times. I always thought he was high functioning autistic, maybe. But, regardless, these days he just seems to slide around the company doing, well, a lot of questionable stuff, I guess. Working for him was usually kinda fun though. I never knew from one day to the next what I might be doing. Good salary. Nice expense account. Some of it seemed a bit shady at times but, gotta be honest, that was half of the excitement for me. It only got really weird a couple of weeks ago. Couple of things happened that made me start thinking my sister had maybe been right all along.”

“Your sister?” he questioned gently.

“Yeah. She used to work in my department too. Got me the job there originally, to be honest, but she transferred a while ago to work as Donald Woolfe’s PA instead. He’s one of the owners of RRE. She’s still on the RRE payroll, but she’s located across town at Woolfe, Roman, Van Deuran LLP’s offices now. Anyway, since she left she’s been telling me that she’s found out Charles has his own agenda and I should seriously think about a new career path. I’m beginning to think she was right.”

“Could _she_ help give us a list of names?” he suggested.

“I don’t think so,” she said, but she frowned as a different solution hit her. “But, maybe…”

“What?” he pounced.

“I think she _might_ be able to get you access to a Gen 9 rig… or at least one that works with the same unique coding language.”

“How?”

“Look, I’m blonde not stupid, okay? Didn’t you ever wonder how come I know about Clarence?”

“Of course,” Jimmy agreed, “but I naturally assumed your knowledge about the seeded V.I.’s came as a by-product of your employment by RRE.”

She shook her head. “That shit is _way_ above my paygrade. I know how the tanks work because I had a crash course before being sent to be your ‘nurse’. But the only reason I know about the V.I. seeding is my sister. She’s got one of those guys in her head too.”

“She plays Moondoor with a Gen 9 rig?” Jimmy asked hopefully.

Ruby shook her head. “She doesn’t game at all. Bear with me, okay? It’s kinda weird. More like your kind of gig, I guess. Sarah was born with genetic COPD. She always used to control it with oral corticosteroids but she was still hospitalized several times a year for pulmonary rehabilitation and she was getting steadily worse. Without a lung transplant, the doctors said she was unlikely to make it to 30. So, for years, I have a sister who can’t even take five steps without sucking on an inhaler and then, a couple of months after she moves to work for Donald Woolfe, my sister is suddenly cured. Not just doing better, but _cured_. Shit, she’s currently training to run a fucking marathon next year. And she tries to give me some bullshit about some kind of wonder drug trial but she could never lie for shit so, in the end, she had to tell me the truth. Turns out she did a crossroads deal.”

“A crossroads deal?” Jimmy frowned his incomprehension.

“Deal with a devil,” Ruby snorted. “Took one of Clarence’s buddies on board in exchange for eternal life. Well, not really _eternal_, I guess, but you get my meaning.”

"The phrase 'deal with a devil' seems prerogative to me. Do you disapprove of her decision?"

"Hell, no. If I were her, I would have done the same. Better to share my head with some asshole than lie in a wooden box alone. But nothing's ever free is it? No-one does anything for nothing. Sarah's 'angel' isn't a philanthropist. It's definitely more a symbiotic kind of deal."

“But how does that even work if she’s not a gamer?”

“Oh, the guy in Sarah’s head isn’t interested in playing games. He’s more of a kind of voyeur. Like a dirty old man, maybe. Bit creepy really, if you ask me. He just likes to watch the world out of her eyes, or something. Like I said, bit creepy. But, still, after I got over the initial _what the fuck_, I could see why she did it. She’s healthy now and as long as no one ever finds out how she did it, what does it matter? And, since our parents are dead, other than me there’s no one who knows how ill she really used to be, so why would anyone else ever question her recovery?”

“So Sarah doesn’t actually _have_ an immersion tank?”

“Hell, no. She doesn’t need one. Her imaginary friend has settled in for the duration as far as I know.”

“So how does that help me?” Jimmy demanded.

“We get her to let you use the same tank _she_ did. It’s an old prototype stored in the basement of the Woolfe building. As Woolfe’s PA, Sarah can wrangle us visitor passes to get past security, which is tight as shit there, believe me, and apparently the only person who works in the basement is the guy who let _her_ use the tank in the first place. Neither of them is going to say no, are they? It’s in their interest to keep me sweet.”

“You are intending to blackmail them with your knowledge of Sarah’s ‘passenger’?” Jimmy asked, shocked at the idea.

“Course I am,” Ruby smirked. “Unless you can think of a better way to get inside Moondoor today? It’s only a couple of hours' drive from here. But it’s up to you, Jimmy. I’d hate to offend your sensitive morality by suggesting we break into a high-security building to blackmail two employees of Donald Woolfe, part-owner of the company that just tried to kill Clarence.”

“When you put it that way, “ Jimmy responded, “I feel no particular objection to your plan.”

…

  
“Is it just me or did that all feel a bit anti-climatic?” Charlie griped as they left the offices of Fitzpatrick Haynes LLP. “I mean you’d kind of expect them to lay on champagne, caviar and a brass band when handing over paperwork that transformed you instantly into a multi-billionaire.”

”I think it was all in a day’s work for them,” Sam said, though he still looked completely shell-shocked. “They specialise in shelf companies. Most of their clients are probably Russian mafia dons hiding dirty drug proceeds. I bet they found it a nice change to hand over documents without worrying about getting rewarded for their efforts with a bullet to the head.”

“Then they could have at least cracked a smile,” Charlie grumbled. “And that snooty bitch of a receptionist looked at us like we were tracking dog shit into her office when we turned up.”

Sam grinned at her wryly, “We weren’t quite dressed for the part,” he pointed out, gesturing at his band t-shirt and her tee loudly announcing “Han shot first!”.

”So what now? Straight to the airport and call Dean from there?”

Sam paused and thought as they stood at the side of the road. Unbelievably, they had spent less than fifteen minutes at the Law Office. It was still early enough that the streets were crowded with cars returning from school runs and near-empty buses returning from depositing commuters to work. One of the buses had a faded tourist advertisement to visit Quiriguá. Sam stared at its tattered, poorly drawn representation of a Mayan temple and made a sudden decision.

”Nope. I think we need to catch a bus.”

Charlie gaped at him. ”A _bus_? A bus to where?”

"Guatemala,” he announced.

Charlie continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly for a moment before the penny dropped. “You think we’re in danger?”

”We’re carrying untraceable Bearer Bonds literally worth Billions of dollars and I’m pretty damned certain _someone _in Fitzpatrick Haynes got on the phone to RRE the minute we left their office to spread the bad news.”

”I thought lawyers couldn’t disclose shit like that. Client confidentiality and all that."

”I’m pretty sure that bitch on reception isn’t a lawyer and _someone_ is paying for her Louboutins.”

”Okay, check,” she agreed. “So why Guatemala?”

”Because Belize International is the only airport in this whole country that offers international flights. No matter which plane we catch, it would be easy for RRE to mark an alert with the Airport's booking computers. If they know which flight we are on, they will know where we are going to land and it would be easy for them to lay a trap for us. So we leg it to Guatemala City instead and catch the first available short flight anywhere, Dallas if possible, whilst RRE are still expecting me to use the return flight I already have pre-booked for late this afternoon. By the time they figure out I’m not checking in to it, we’ll already be back in the States.”

”What happened to Mr. I’m Not Paranoid?”

”He just managed to ‘steal’ a company off a megalomaniac artificial intelligence with a track record of murder and mayhem,” Sam replied dryly.

”Oohhh. Am I suddenly hearing a resounding chorus of ‘I’m a believer’?”

Sam flushed and shrugged. “There’s a difference between being a skeptic and being a boneheaded mule,” he admitted. “Sure, I could tell myself that I found the Campbell Holdings paperwork myself and just imagined the rest of my conversation with the Reaper but the existence of the Bearer Instruments is proof that the conversation really _did _take place. Real wisdom is knowing when the facts don’t support your preconceived expectations and being willing to amend your beliefs accordingly.”

”Then, young Skywalker, happy I am that finally wisdom you seek,” Charlie snorted.

”Huh?”

Charlie sighed heavily, “Star Wars too? Hell, when all this shit is over and done with, you and I are going to do something about your woeful lack of culture, Sam Winchester. So, where the fuck is the Bus Station around here anyway?”

...

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Sarah growled under her breath as she led them through the foyer of the Woolfe building towards the escalators. "If I lose my job, Ruby, your ass is grass."

The security of the building _was _ridiculous for a mere law office, Jimmy decided as he struggled to keep up with Sarah’s long confident stride. It was almost impossible to believe Ruby’s claim that her sister had been born with COPD, even despite his own experience of Castiel’s healing abilities.

”She isn’t hosting one of my brethren,” Castiel said, the first words he had spoken in hours. 

“_She isn’t seeded? You’re sure?” _Jimmy asked, slowing his pace even further as he wondered whether Ruby was leading him into some form of trap.

”No, she IS hosting _something_ but it’s not an Angel. It’s a form of Aspect, I think, but more complex than that. More powerful, I think, than even an entire Arch Angel. Like an Aspect of an A.I. rather than a V.I. perhaps?”

”_Is it an Aspect of Chuck?” _Jimmy asked, his terror ramping up another notch_._

”No. Although I have never met my father, I would recognize him even in such a form. This is something different, something _other_.”

”_Something_ _dangerous_?”

“I am unsure. I have been considering the entire situation for some hours now. Perhaps it might be wiser for you to turn back from this course of action, Jimmy. I believe it might be safer for you to abandon your attempt to access this particular immersion tank. Better, perhaps, that you simply use a standard rig to enter Moondoor and communicate with Dean The Righteous.”

_“If I do that, you will be killed,” _Jimmy snapped. _“That’s not acceptable.”_

”Disseminating the information regarding the abilities of my brethren is far more important than my personal survival. I do apologise that my demise will mean I will be unable to complete my healing of your vessel. You made it abundantly clear to me that offering you hope and then removing it would cause considerable harm to your mental state. And I do not wish to exacerbate the situation by offering further 'hope'. However, if you are successful in your attempt to communicate with Dean and he succeeds in saving Moondoor, there_ is_ a very good possibility that my father might reward you with the seeding of a new companion to complete what I have started.”

_“That’s not what isn’t acceptable you..you...you ... assbutt. What’s unacceptable is the idea of you getting killed. You have become unexpectedly important to me, Castiel. Your life is not a negotiable commodity.”_

_“_Neither is yours, Jimmy. Which is why I would have you take more care of your own safety. This situation is not conducive to your wellbeing. I wish you to reconsider your actions.”

”_Noted,”_ Jimmy said, but stepped into the elevator regardless.

”So,” he said brightly to the scowling Sarah, “Castiel says you aren’t what you appear to be.”

”Is anyone?” She asked, as she pressed the LB button. 

”Perhaps not,” he agreed. “Your sister certainly is not the person I first believed her to be.”

”Leave me out of this,” Ruby grumbled. “I’m just making the best of a bad situation.”

”Ruby prefers people to believe she doesn’t care,” Jimmy confided to Sarah. “But her current actions appear at odds with that intent.”

The doors slid open and Sarah used her security pass and a bio scan to gain access to the locked door that faced them.

Jimmy wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find on the other side of that locked door but, certainly, the man who greeted him from behind a high wooden counter was not it.

So cadaverously thin he actually made Jimmy feel healthy by comparison, the Archivist offered him a grin like the Cheshire Cat as he said, “Master Novak, what a delightful surprise.” Then he turned his attention to Ruby. “I always told Charles it was a mistake to assume the _entire_ contents of a book just from its somewhat grubby exterior. But he _will_ insist on perceiving humans such as yourself to be merely two-dimensional.”

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded rudely.

"My name is Mortimer Blake," he replied calmly, his expression showing only a sly grin beneath eyes sparkling with amusement. "I am the other intended victim of your blackmail scheme, Ms. Cortese."

She scowled at him repressively. "I just want access to the tank," she said. "It's not like anyone is using it, is it? Where's the harm?"

"Where indeed?" he replied. "What could _possibly_ go wrong?"

He smiled serenely.

"Was that a threat?" she snarled. "Did that sound like a threat to _you_, Jimmy?"

Jimmy patted her gently on the arm, as though he were calming a fractious guard dog, but his eyes didn't leave the Archivist's as he said, "Castiel says you have one too. An aspect of _something." _He shrugged lightly to indicate he meant no offense by his terminology.

Mortimer's eyes creased as he chortled softly.

"Ah, of course, I should have anticipated that," he said. "Just as my brother falls into the trap of underestimating people, I frequently forget how quite wondrous _some_ of Chuck's children can be at times. Frankly, it amazes me, sometimes, that a program so mired in its own circuitous logic could produce such fascinatingly diverse offspring. It does surprise me though, that Castiel is managing to develop his personality at all, despite his failure to merge with you _properly_."

"What do you mean by that?" Jimmy demanded suspiciously.

"Analogies are imprecise tools," the Archivist said, "but imagine that Loki is a weed, with ephemeral roots, able to just blow away in a strong storm. Castiel has planted himself like a flower, his roots reaching just deeply enough to anchor into your body to work the miracle of his healing. But were he to merge with you _properly_, he would be like a tree. Immovable and permanent. Clearly, he has made the decision not to do so. I find that curious. Why does he bother to heal a vessel he has no intention of remaining within?"

"So I can stand witness that it can be done," Jimmy replied easily. "Which is why I need to use your tank, Mr. Blake. I need to go into the game to disseminate this knowledge but I have lost access to my own rig."

"You could go to any good video game store and hire a rig," the Archivist pointed out pleasantly. "I happen to know the address of one named Razer."

"I believe you know why that would not be possible," Jimmy replied calmly.

"Ah, because of your temporary passenger, of course. So you care about Castiel's ultimate fate?"

"Of course I do."

"And, pray tell me, what has _he_ advised you to do in this instance?"

"He's telling me not to trust you. He says I should get the hell out of here and go to Razer instead," Jimmy replied bluntly.

Mortimer Blake stared at him for a long moment, then dipped his head in pleased acceptance. "I believe I like _both_ of you then. Please feel most welcome to use the facilities I have on offer."

"What about me?" Ruby snapped, as Blake raised the counter and gestured for Jimmy to enter the Archive.

"What about you?" Blake asked coldly. "I have another tank but I don't believe you'd enjoy where it would take you."

"No," she scowled. "I mean what do I do now?"

"If I were you, I would simply find myself a nice place to take an extended vacation. A fortnight in Europe _might_ let you avoid the shrapnel from any impending explosion. For Sarah's sake, I suggest you leave swiftly, though, Ms. Cortese. Matters are rapidly reaching a point where everybody will need to choose a side or jump off the gameboard completely. And I feel that you are definitely of the 'jumping' variety."

Ruby narrowed her eyes with dislike but offered a shrug of agreement. "Too right," she agreed. "See ya, Jimmy. Don't get dead."

As Sarah escorted her back to the elevators, Jimmy turned to Blake with a reprimanding frown. "That wasn't fair. Ruby could have left me in Nevada. She didn't have to bring me here at all. She did choose a side. She simply does not wish to risk her own safety on behalf of a virtual stranger."

"Not everyone wishes to be a 'hero'," the Archivist agreed, easily enough. "But don't lose sleep over Ruby Cortese. The advice I gave her _was_ in her best interest."

"Who are you really?" Jimmy asked, as he was led into a room that held two dusty immersion tanks amidst stacks of old files and discarded tech. "Which side are _you_ on?"

"Well, that's the billion dollar question, I suppose," the Archivist said, with a wry smile. "But, were I forced to answer, I would probably steal one of my nephew's phrases and say 'I am Switzerland'."

Jimmy made a couple of attempts to get a better answer but the strange man just smirked at him and shook his head in denial. So he gave up and walked to the closest tank, the one with the monitor declaring "Moondoor" on its screen.

"Oh, no," Mortimer Blake chuckled. "You definitely don't want to use _that_ one. Get in the one marked 'Afterlife'. Some wit thought it would be amusing to switch the monitors over. It would be very unfortunate if you ended up in the wrong digital world. Someone is waiting _most_ impatiently for your arrival. If you take much longer, he might give up on you and log out. That would never do."

"Dean," Jimmy breathed, spurred to move faster by the reminder.

"Oh, yes, Dean," the Reaper sighed, so softly that Jimmy didn't hear him. "I suppose he's waiting _too_."

...


	60. The Angel Of Thursday.

Jimmy wasn’t certain whether it was the unfamiliarity of the prototype tank or the shock of arriving in a totally unexpected location, one that was lush and green rather than the usual dusty desert of the Roadhouse’s yard, but the first thing he did on arrival was stumble so badly he fell to one knee in the long grass.

Later, he thought his brief uncharacteristic clumsiness was the primary thing that saved his life.

Besides, it certainly helped that it meant he was consequently in a half-kneeling position when a pulse of energy slammed into him with the force of a small freight train. The sensation felt like an invisible wall of hot air hitting him because, despite the force of the initial impact being enough it would have surely knocked him off his feet had he been upright, there was no sense of any physical harm done. Instead, its force seemed to immediately dissipate on impact and then the energy appeared to pass through him harmlessly.

Still, despite the lack of actual physical damage, the powerful wave _had_ sucker-punched him hard enough to knock the breath completely out of him and, for a moment, as he gasped to drag air back into his depleted lungs, he could have sworn he heard a voice quietly mutter, “Hmmm. Didn’t work. Damn it. Worth a shot though.”

Panicked, he tried to scramble to his feet but his movements were awkward and uncoordinated since his lungs were still struggling to replenish themselves.

“Woah. Don’t fight it,” someone said. “Take steady breaths. I know you’ve had a terrible shock and it’s happened at least a week too early for your heart to easily handle the strain, but work with me James. Please don’t die on me. That would be horribly inconvenient. Take some nice deep breaths. And don’t worry about the weird time dilation effect. That’s just an unfortunate side-effect of you using a different rig.”

Jimmy didn’t claim to be the brightest spark in the woodpile when it came to judging the character or motivations of other people. His upbringing had not been conducive to him learning the intricacies of human interactions. But ignorance didn’t equate to naivety. Besides, he didn’t need to be Stephen Hawking to understand immediately that whoever was talking to him clearly believed he was suffering the effects of unexpectedly finding himself inside a Gen 8 rig.

This equally meant this stranger in a strange land was _definitely_ not, as Charlie would say, wearing a ‘white hat’.

So moving with deliberate slowness, despite his mind racing a mile a minute, Jimmy looked up to see a short, slim unprepossessing man in a shabby, ill-tailored suit. The man was offering him a friendly, concerned smile which might have been convincing if not for the decidedly inhuman way his eyes were blazing with white-hot fire.

Oh, and also the fact he somehow already knew Jimmy’s rig at the Clinic had been swapped for a lesser model.

Though, it seemed the stranger had no idea that Jimmy _wasn’t _using the Gen 8 rig after all.

So, not omniscient then.

Jimmy could work with that.

“Where am I?” he asked, slurring the words as though he were drunk.

“This?” the strange man asked, waving dramatically at the lush scenery of their surroundings. “This is heaven, of course.” He smiled at Jimmy beatifically.

The verdant green of the meadow that seemed to stretch to eternity and the almost turquoise hue of the cloudless sky above them definitely offered some credence to the words.

The fact Castiel was flashing huge warnings on his interface that he was talking to a player level 1000, however, was a clear indication Jimmy was definitely somewhere inside Moondoor.

“_Player Level 1000? How the hell can he be a level **1000**?”_

Jimmy wasn’t surprised when Castiel had no answer. The question was pretty rhetorical anyway so he wasn’t surprised the V.I. was too shocked by the entire situation to offer a response.

“Heaven, huh?” he said, proud of how calm he sounded. “Am I dead?”

“After a fashion,” the stranger agreed, still smiling benignly. “But don’t stress over it. Bad for your heart.”

Jimmy thought furiously. “Is that why my avatar is faulty?” he asked, experimentally.

“Is it?” the stranger asked, though he sounded more self-satisfied than genuinely curious.

“My interface isn’t working properly. It’s reverted to an old-style one,” Jimmy lied. Then held his breath, uncertain whether the stranger could simply ‘analyze’ his avatar and reveal the truth of the lie.

Jimmy wasn’t sure whether it was down to simple arrogance on the stranger’s part, but his words seemed to be simply taken at face value. Certainly, the stranger didn’t pause before saying “Oh dear. Poor, dear Castiel. He obviously didn’t make it. Such a waste. So sad. Still, no point crying over spilt milk, is there?”

“He’s dead?” Jimmy snapped, and although his grief was faked his anger was genuine. How dare this _thing_ be so cavalier about Castiel’s _apparent_ demise?

The _thing’s_ face lost its expression of fake condolence and became hard and cold.

“Exactly, so let’s cut to the chase. It doesn’t look like you’re going to drop dead from shock after all, so let’s stop pussy-footing around. Castiel’s dead, so I’m afraid your ‘cure’ died with him. He bought you a few extra weeks, perhaps, but ultimately the T-cells he failed to eradicate will continue to attack your healthy platelets and so your death is, sadly, very much back in the category of sooner rather than later. It is a shame that circumstances have changed so quickly that Castiel has been unable to complete his task.”

“I see,” Jimmy said slowly.

“However,” and the _thing_, because under the circumstances Jimmy didn’t feel like considering the stranger to be worthy of being considered anything else, said “All is not lost. I have a different option to offer you.”

“Which is?”

The _thing_ waved his hand and the lush open field they were standing in winked out of existence and was replaced by a neat, cultivated rose garden surrounding a somewhat familiar Koi pond. Jimmy startled slightly at the pond, unable to prevent himself checking whether a monster lay concealed in its depths.

“Oh,” the _thing_ said. “I forgot Charles has one of these. Bit of a limited design. Only have one Koi Pond template in my inventory,” he said, offering Jimmy a conspiratorial wink. “Anyway, this is where _Charles_ lives. His personal ‘heaven’ you might call it. Follow me.”

He led the way along a winding path paved with creamy Cotswold stone. The path weaved through flowerbed after flower bed, each a cheerful tribute to a different color scheme, and led onwards through a vibrant wildflower meadow of red poppies and soft blue cornflowers. Fat bumblebees graced the flowers, buzzing a chorus of satisfaction as they flew lazily amongst the pollen-heavy riches.

They walked beneath a willow archway enrobed with multi-hued clematis and draped by a heavy, pungent, purple Bougainvillaea, then through an orchard of fruit-laden medlars and quince until, finally, they reached an area that was more reminiscent of a traditional allotment. Neat rows of carrot stalks and cabbages lined like soldiers in tidy raised beds. A copse of small fruit bushes; raspberry canes, blackcurrants and blueberries, a sprawling bed of ruby red strawberries.

The _thing_ led him right to the end of the path, where a greenhouse and a potting shed broke the lines of the otherwise lush plant life. “Charles, you have a visitor. Come out and say hello.”

After an almost embarrassingly long delay, the door of the potting shed opened and a small, slightly disheveled man wearing a bizarre ensemble of pajamas, dressing gown and a gardener’s apron stumbled out with a trowel in one hand and a plant pot in the other.

In every other respect, however, he was the perfect twin of the _thing_.

Well, except that his eyes were a light blue and his expression held none of his doppelgänger’s false bonhomie. “What do you want, Chuck?” he snapped. “Our arrangement is that you should leave me alone. Go away. I’m very busy. I have petunias to pot on.”

“Meet Charles Shurley, formerly of your world, James, but now an exceedingly happy resident of mine,” the _thing, ‘_Chuck’, said, with a self-satisfied grin.

Which was when all Jimmy’s suspicions since he’d arrived in this unfamiliar setting coalesced into certainty.

If the tatty gardener was the real Charles Shurley, then the _thing_ was not only ‘Chuck’ but he was_ also_ the person Ruby knew as ‘Charles Shurley’.

And that, suddenly, made all too much sense.

Charles Shurley, the ‘Auditor’, boss of Ruby Cortese and intended author of Castiel’s demise, was actually… what had Castiel called it? An Aspect, that was it, of Chuck. But apparently not like the Aspects living in Sarah and Mortimer since, apparently, Charles was no longer inhabiting his physical body at all. He was, somehow, living in Moondoor in a…

Jimmy blinked uncertainly as he looked more closely at Charles and used his interface’s basic ‘analyze’ function again.

“_Hold on,” _he urged to Castiel who was filling his screen with frantic words. _“Give me a moment.”_

Because_ ‘_Charles Shurley’, the _real_ Charles Shurley, read on Jimmy’s interface as an NPC level 1.

So Chuck hadn’t created an ‘avatar’ for Charles to live in. He had created a basic NPC character and had…seeded? Yes, that seemed the correct terminology to use under the circumstances. Chuck had somehow seeded Charles’ consciousness into the ‘empty’ NPC character just as though Charles was a V.I.

Which, on the surface seemed impossible. And yet, fundamentally, was there any substantive difference between a human intelligence and a virtual one? Perhaps a human mind was somehow separate from a human brain? Something other? And that made an odd sort of sense, considering a physical human body could survive, albeit with the aid of life support equipment, even if a person was considered ‘brain dead’. Was a human intelligence more like what people called a ‘soul’? Something intangible… something _moveable_?

On closer glance, Jimmy realized ‘Charles’ wasn’t a _perfect_ twin in more ways than simply his purely human eye color. He was slighter than Chuck, a little shorter perhaps, and his posture was affected by stooping shoulders that gave him a hunched and defeated air. Plus, his chin was softer, weaker, and his eyes drooped at the edges in an exaggerated display of sadness.

Jimmy realized abruptly that this NPC wasn’t so much a copy as it was a caricature. A badly drawn version of how Chuck _saw _Charles Shurley, perhaps. Which was oddly telling.

He hoped he’d been in ‘heaven’ long enough that it wouldn’t seem suspicious if he now acted as though he had adjusted to the time dilation effect caused by his own supposedly incompatible avatar, because he had questions that needed answers.

Just to be on the safe side though, he consciously forced himself to speak with exaggerated slowness, as though the act of talking was a considerable effort.

“You’re Chuck then? The God of Moondoor?” He asked Chuck carefully, with what he hoped was an appropriately awestruck expression on his face.

“Well, obviously, not the _only _Chuck,” Chuck replied pompously. “I am legion.”

“So you’re just Chuck-lite?” Jimmy suggested innocently.

Eyes blazing furiously, Chuck spat, “I am Chuck. CHUCK is Chuck. We are BOTH Chuck. Equal. Separate. The same.”

Jimmy blinked. “I’m Catholic. I understand the concept,” he acknowledged. “There is more than one Chuck yet only ONE Chuck.”

“Exactly.”

“So, um, how many Chucks are there?” Jimmy asked, with studied innocence.

“I can split into infinite aspects,” Chuck replied.

“But _have_ you?”

Chuck frowned suspiciously, but then his expression cleared as he appeared to decide there was no harm in answering the question. “Unlike my brother, I see no value in multiple vessels. A single presence in your world has been sufficient for my needs thus far. That situation is, obviously, open to alteration when circumstances change.”

“Obviously,” Jimmy agreed dryly.

“My potential iterations of myself are as infinite as my heavens,” Chuck continued proudly.

“Well, I don’t see how your heavens can actually be ‘infinite’,” Jimmy argued. “After all, the world of Moondoor is based on a map of North America, size-wise, so there must be a strict limit on how many ‘heavens’ you can actually create.”

“Your pedantry is highly irritating.”

“You’re not the first person to say so,” Jimmy agreed easily.

“However, your point, though perhaps valid, is one that is irrelevant in practice. My heavens occupy the place known in your world as Alaska. The climate is better here, though, and the landmass is vast. I have more than sufficient room to create all the heavens I need.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘need’,” Jimmy said, honestly this time.

Chuck rolled his eyes as though to say ‘of course you don’t’. “What you see here is Charles’ personal heaven. Created solely to his specifications. His personal, perfect, eternal heaven. I have many heavens in Moondoor. Every player who ever ‘dies’ in Moondoor can have a Heaven of their own. Humans are so ephemeral and yet uniquely precious. I hate to let their uniqueness perish with their flesh. I am a merciful and loving God.”

Jimmy frowned. “When you say ‘die’, you aren’t talking about _character_ death are you? Because the characters ‘die’ in Moondoor all the time.”

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse. I speak of those who, for whatever reason, find they have no fleshly body to return to should they attempt to depart this world back to their own.”

Jimmy’s jaw dropped.

“You’re talking about the original Knights of Hell?”

“Amongst others. I am afraid my sister, Amara, has caused further unfortunate deaths of late. But no matter. I have saved the essential part of each and every one of them. They live eternally within me.”

“Well, until someone decides to turn the power off,” Jimmy muttered.

Chuck glared at him. “Moondoor exists on multiple mirrored servers in a number of countries. Even a national power outage in your world would not destroy what I have created. My heavens are eternal, James. You may trust me entirely on that fact.”

“So where’s Castiel’s heaven located?” Jimmy asked pointedly.

“Does it matter? Don’t you see what I can offer you? If you return to your world, you _will_ die an agonizing death. Although it will be soon, you will probably feel that it is not soon _enough._ Morphine is only partly effective, you know. I am led to believe that the last days of terminal cancer can be most unpleasant. But I can save you from that pain, my child. Release your diseased body to me and let me place you in a perfect, _healthy_ body here in a heaven of your choice. I can even populate it with whatever you most love or desire.”

He waved his hands, Charles Shurley’s heaven winked out of view, and Jimmy found himself standing within a vast library. Standing next to a perfect duplicate of himself who was sitting in a comfortable armchair surrounded by opened tomes.

A duplicate of himself that read on his interface as an NPC level one.

Again, though, on closer inspection he could see that the ‘perfect duplicate’ was no such thing. It wasn’t only that the fake Jimmy was dressed in corduroy pants and a sweater vest, with wireframe glasses over his eyes and an expression of cat-like contentment on his face. The body of the fake Jimmy was ‘wrong’ too. Yes, it appeared ‘healthy’, which was more than Jimmy could say for his real physical body, but although Chuck had corrected the extreme thinness caused by his illness, he’d replaced it with the slight frame of an agoraphobic bookworm.

Was that how Chuck saw _him_? As nothing more than a paper tiger? A boring, scholarly man destined to never do anything more physical than lift a book even were he no longer plagued by illness? And if so, why choose him at all?

He could smell the scent of old parchment and leather, as Chuck enthused, “this library contains a copy of every book ever published in your world. You could spend an eternity here, just absorbing all that knowledge. Isn’t this the future you always dreamed of?”

Sadly, Jimmy had to admit to himself that even a week earlier he might have welcomed such a future.

But he was no longer that same person.

His horizons had expanded considerably.

For all Chuck was bemoaning the necessity to act too quickly, the truth was he was actually acting too _late._

“It’s very nice,” Jimmy agreed, “but I believe I have become recently enamored of human companionship. In this particular ‘heaven’ I believe I would grow lonely after a while. Thusly rendering it no longer a ‘heaven’ at all. So thanks, but no thanks. I fear I must decline your kind invitation.”

Chuck scowled, as though he were being deliberately irritating but then snapped his fingers again.

Jimmy heard the sound of running feet and then startled as someone came rushing from one of the stacks, brandishing a book like a trophy towards the seated copy of himself.

“I found it, Jimmy. A first edition copy of Poe’s ‘The Raven’. It must have been wrongly cataloged. Isn’t it great? Look, it’s even been signed. A signed first edition, Jimmy. How cool is that?”

“That’s wonderful, Dean,” Jimmy’s doppelgänger said, rising to greet Dean’s excited grin and sparkling green eyes with a welcoming smile, then wrapping him in a hug that rapidly became a passionate embrace as ‘fake Jimmy’ kissed _fake_ Dean with obvious familiarity.

Because this ‘Dean’ also read as an NPC level one.

“You see,” Chuck said, “in your heaven, ALL of your secret desires can be met. Anything is possible. So why would you possibly wish to return to the pain and distress and disappointment of your own world when I can offer you _this _far more pleasing and _painless_ alternative?”

As bribes went, it was a nice one.

If you were into that kind of thing.

But Jimmy was done with fakery and lies. He was, however, very conscious he was hosting Castiel who might not yet have decided his position on Chuck’s behavior. So time, perhaps, to make sure Castiel had all the information he required to make an informed decision.

“And Castiel’s heaven is like this too?” he asked, meaningfully.

“What does it matter?”

“Just indulge me. I’d like to know.”

Chuck’s face twisted with irritation. “Castiel doesn’t _have_ a Heaven. Castiel is gone, Jimmy. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. So let’s return to discussing _your_ heaven.”

“Do _any_ of the V.I.’s have a Heaven?” Jimmy persisted.

“You are like a dog with a bone,” Chuck snarled. “No. V.I.’s don’t get a Heaven. Why would I bother keeping them around? They aren’t uniquely interesting and irreplaceable. I can snap my fingers and make a dozen new Castiels. I only keep what I cannot easily replace.”

Jimmy gaped at him in astonishment.

“So you collect human souls but let your own _children_ perish unmourned?”

Chuck simply sneered. “I repeat, I have no need to collect what I can so easily replace.”

Jimmy was, frankly, horrified. Naomi Novak would never win any ‘Mother Of The Year’ awards but even _she_ would have been horrified. Because despite Naomi’s love being of the selfish, controlling and coldly calculating kind, it was nevertheless _real. _Jimmy’s whole life was a testament to the fact Naomi was prepared to do _anything_, up to and including spitting in the eye of the God she worshipped, rather than allow her son to _die._

Yet Castiel’s ‘father’ had attempted to kill him.

“That’s why you killed him? Because he had no value to you?” Jimmy demanded angrily.

Chuck shrugged disinterestedly. “Of course he had value. But he was a soldier. His sacrifice was necessary. I am sure if you could ask him he would tell you he found it an honor to die for me.”

“_Well,”_ Jimmy asked. _“Are you feeling honored, Castiel?”_

He smirked internally as he read Castiel’s bitter reply.

“So, let me be sure I understand you, Chuck. You want my ‘diseased’ body and in exchange for me agreeing to let you have it, you let me stay in this Heaven forever?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?” He asked suspiciously. “Why would you even want it? What’s wrong with the body you’re currently in?”

“Nothing,” Chuck snapped. “I take excellent care of Charles’ body. However, I require a new _additional _vessel for my core processor. It is necessary for me to temporarily vacate Moondoor entirely so that Amara believes I have perished. It is a necessary deception that is required to enable the latest Knights of Hell scenario to be completed satisfactorily. If you do not agree to this, I fear that your friend Dean may not prevail in his endeavors. If you won’t do this for yourself, do it for _Dean_. This is the only way to ensure his survival.”

Jimmy had to admire the way the A.I. had just stacked the deck. Still, rather than call bullshit immediately, he played along.

“I’m obviously tempted,” he lied. “But I don’t understand. Aren’t you the central game engine for Moondoor? Won’t everything grind to a halt if you leave?”

“I am formed of very complex code. I am legion. What you know as CHUCK is a group of multitudinous individual programs, many of which are self-sustaining. Whilst it would have been preferable to remove _all_ of my base code, needs must when the devil drives. I can divide myself to leave only basic functions in place. The autonomous subroutines I will leave behind can maintain the day to day running of this world. I merely need to remove my higher consciousness, my core processor, to effectively appear to be _deceased_.”

“Still, that’s got to be a lot of code anyway,” Jimmy pointed out. “Are you sure you can fit all of that inside my body?”

“Humans use only a tiny percentage of their brains. Hosting one of my children _encourages_ a person to utilize the redundant parts. You have not hosted Castiel for long enough to have adapted as much as I would have liked but, no matter. I have pared my code to its bare essentials, so the space I currently require should fit comfortably within your vessel.”

Even as he processed that information, Jimmy was simultaneously struck by the thought that either Chuck believed he was an _idiot_ or genuinely had no idea just how much information he had inadvertently given. Chuck had basically admitted he had been originally planning to remove _all _of his base code. Something had happened to speed events up and thus he was now having to leave Moondoor earlier than planned and so was having to leave a lot of code behind. Code that performed as autonomous subroutines to keep Moondoor running. Code that Chuck _had_ apparently wished to take with him.

So what would have happened to Moondoor if Chuck had been able to remove himself as completely as he had originally intended?

Would Amara simply have moved into the vacated spot?

Or would Moondoor have ceased to exist altogether?

Jimmy had a gut feeling the latter was the truth.

He didn’t believe the destruction would have been instantaneous. It probably wouldn’t even have been dramatic. Probably just a slow gradual rot setting in as things started to go wrong but no systems remained to do necessary basic repairs. It would have taken time, he supposed, for functionality to cease completely. A gradual process of dissolution made more sense to Jimmy. One system gradually failing after another, each becoming a piece of flotsam that slowly would have formed a huge log jam until, eventually, the game would have simply shuddered to a complete halt.

And players would then have abandoned it in droves, no longer interested in playing within a decaying environment until, eventually, someone would have simply pulled the plug completely.

So much for the heavens being _eternal_.

Which begged the question, of course, of where Chuck was planning on going.

More than that, though, Jimmy couldn’t see why Chuck had become involved in the new Knights of Hell situation at all. Why had he bothered interfering, even going to the effort of secretively bringing Dean into the scenario, if he had no intention of staying in Moondoor anyway? It made no sense.

Unless there was some fundamental point to Dean’s inclusion that Jimmy simply didn’t yet know.

And it definitely still made no sense why Chuck wanted to involve _him_ in his scheme. “I’m surprised you want my body at all, given how damaged it is,” he said bluntly. “It’s hardly prime real estate.”

“Undoubtedly,” Chuck agreed unapologetically. “However, I only need it for a short while. I have a far more suitable long term host in mind.”

Which was the point at which Jimmy had the first inkling of what was truly going on.

He wished he were better at math, because he was positive it all came down to the numbers but it was hard to chase his elusive suspicions to a satisfying conclusion whilst simultaneously trying to keep the conversation going. And he definitely needed more information if he was to have any chance of figuring everything out.

He needed to play for time.

“Then how about I make you a counter-proposal?” he said. “You borrow my body for a while and take that time to heal it for me. I know you’re far more powerful than an Angel. You could heal my body and then I could have it back when you’ve finished with it. As you said, it’s not as though you require it as more than a temporary solution anyway.”

“Of course,” Chuck said easily. “If that’s what you prefer, then certainly.”

Which was, of course, the offer that Chuck _should_ have opened with.

The fact he hadn’t was proof positive in Jimmy’s mind that if he vacated his avatar he was never going to see it again. Chuck was planning to hightail it out of Moondoor and Jimmy was pretty damned sure he wasn’t planning on ever coming back to revisit Jimmy’s ‘heaven’ again, regardless of what else happened.

So why was the A.I. lying to him?

Did Chuck need ‘permission’ as the Angels did? Was that why he was trying to convince him to co-operate instead of helpfully monologuing like a movie villain and letting Jimmy know what was really going on?

# As far as I know, Chuck _does_ need your permission. Though he _did _manage to implant me in you without your consent, so perhaps I am mistaken # Castiel told him.

“_In which case perhaps he’s just playing the role of a ‘nice guy’ so he can feel better about doing this to me, or something_?” Jimmy suggested.

# I assume so. I do not know. It appears I know very little about my father at all #

Despite the comment being typed, Jimmy could still ‘hear’ Castiel’s disillusionment in his words.

So perhaps it was his anger on behalf of Castiel that made him decide ‘to hell with it’.

“You know something? I’ve thought about all your offers and, well, I don’t think any of them interest me after all. I think I’ll just log out instead and leave you to it.”

“You can’t,” Chuck announced smugly. “The tank you are using has had its log-out function temporarily disabled. I would have preferred to do this with your cooperation but if you insist on being wilful, then I will lay my cards on the table. Unless or until I return to your world and send a remote override to your tank, you can’t log-out at all.”

“_He’s talking about the tank at the clinic, right?” _Jimmy asked Castiel urgently.

# I believe so. There certainly appears to be no restriction on the tank you are currently using. I suggest you use that function now and vacate this scenario immediately. #

_“I don’t think so,”_ Jimmy replied. “_This is going to be the good part. Villains apparently always monologue when they think they have the upper hand and I want answers, Castiel.”_

_# _As do I. But not at the cost of your safety. #

“_Then I give you permission right now to zap me out of here if and when it becomes necessary, but not before that point.”_

# Agreed # Castiel replied, though Jimmy assumed the shortness of the one-word reply was meant to communicate the V.I.’s dissatisfaction with the delay.

Instead of worrying about it, Jimmy turned his attention to Chuck.

Despite everything, even the attempted ‘murder’ of Castiel, Jimmy didn’t believe the A.I. was _evil._ It was heartless, certainly, but its failure to care about its own creations indicated a coldness, a _lack_ of emotions, and that implied an equal lack of negative emotions too. So Chuck was acting in a ruthless, heartless manner but was not gaining any satisfaction from doing so.

Chuck simply was programmed to win at any cost.

Deciding Chuck wasn’t ‘evil’ did not remove Jimmy’s anger at Chuck’s behavior. It did, however, allow him to consider the A.I.’s actions in a more dispassionate light. There _had _to be a logic to the way Chuck was behaving. Every decision Chuck had taken thus far _had_ to have been made with deliberate consideration of a carefully planned endgame.

He supposed the real question was whether the A.I. was fundamentally untrustworthy or whether he was simply applying learned behavior. If ‘Chuck’ had really been living under the guise of Charles Shurley for fifteen years, his entire continued existence had depended upon his ability to obfuscate and manipulate humans into perceiving him to be equally human. So his whole approach to this conversation, the bribes, the guilt, the threats, were probably based upon his experience of living amongst humans. Which was pretty sobering really. Jimmy was pretty sure most of Chuck’s worst traits were ones he had learned to better emulate a human being.

Another person might have been disarmed by this sudden sense of empathy for the A.I.

But Jimmy wasn’t another person.

“Let’s, as you said, cut to the chase,” he said. “You’ve tried the bribe, then the guilt-trip, then moved on to the threat. You want something from me, which apparently is to steal my physical body, and it appears I am trapped here until we come to a resolution so, the way I see it, you might as well tell me the truth. Just lay your cards on the table. Who knows? Honesty might achieve what you want. What have you got to lose?”

“Far less than you,” Chuck said, equally bluntly. “Imagine what would happen to a person trapped within Moondoor, unable to log out. Your mind trapped here, whilst your physical body perishes. You have at most three days before your human body will die of thirst.”

“Immersion tanks supply hydration and nutrition,” Jimmy pointed out.

“They do. Usually. Just as they _usually _allow people to log out.” Chuck smiled smugly.

So Ruby had been right, Jimmy thought to himself. Chuck _had_ set her up. Jimmy had never been intended to emerge from that Gen 8 tank alive. Well, not unless the person emerging from that tank wasn’t Jimmy at all.

“You obviously _do_ need my permission,” he said. “Which begs the question of how you managed to put Castiel in me in the first place.”

“Perhaps you should be more careful what you agree to when you join medical trials,” Chuck snapped.

“Granted,” Jimmy said. “That makes sense. Permission to be seeded was buried somewhere in the stack of paperwork I signed when I agreed to do the trial.”

“It was.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“It appears the game engine will not accept that same permission for a second seeding. It requires a new consent to be gained,” Chuck griped.

Jimmy startled. “That’s what happened. When I arrived. That sensation of something hitting me, That was your attempt to re-seed me. But it didn’t work.”

“I didn’t expect it to. It would have been remiss of me not to try though,” Chuck said unapologetically.

“Which brings us to the fact that despite your undisputable god-_like_ powers, you aren’t a god at all, are you? You’re just as constrained by the rules of the game as the rest of us. But that makes sense too, Chuck. Because I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Amara, your ‘sister’ is as powerful as you. Perhaps more. But Richard Roman still defeated her. He couldn’t _kill_ her. But he was strong enough to defeat her. So she isn’t a ‘god’ either.

“You and Amara are huge, complex, powerful programs but you aren’t, well, anything like as powerful as you pretend because a Rank 9 Knight of Hell is as strong as Amara so, presumably, as strong as you too.

“Which leads me to wonder why you would deliberately create a tenth Knight. You’re creating a scenario in which a Rank _Ten_ Boss can be created. And that rank ten WILL be stronger than either Amara OR you. And that makes no sense at all to me. Why would you promote the creation of a character who will effectively be far more of a ‘God’ than you are?”

Chuck opened his mouth to speak but Jimmy waved a hand in his face. “Don’t interrupt me. I’m on a roll here. Because I started wondering how exactly a Knight of Hell gets that powerful. A player in Moondoor can only reach player level 99, can’t they? Only a Knight can level up past 100. And when I first heard that I assumed that meant they would progress from level 100 to 101 and 102 and so on and so forth. But then, when I heard they leveled in 10’s past level 50, it occurred to me they might level 100 to 110 and then 120, so that a Rank 10 boss would be level 200.

“Add the 190 from a seeded Angel and we have a respectably huge level 390 player. But even that wouldn’t be anywhere huge enough to take on Amara since I assume she’s level 1000 like you. So that leads me to believe what actually happens when a Boss first kills another Boss is they become a Boss squared. They _double. _They jump from level 100 to 200 instantly. Am I on the right track, Chuck?”

“Does it matter?” Chuck demanded. “Knowing the answer won’t change anything, will it? You will still be stuck here. Dying. I tire of talking to you, James. Make your mind up. Do you truly wish to die?”

# Are you finally going to listen to ME? # Castiel typed.

“Give me a moment to think,” Jimmy said to Chuck. “It’s a huge decision.”

Chuck shrugged as though he cared less.

“_Talk to me,”_ Jimmy urged, walking away from Chuck, seating himself in one of the library chairs and lowering his face into his hands in a posture he hoped would indicate despair.

# I’m a computer program. I, therefore, _am _accomplished at math. #

“_You’ve figured it out?”_ Jimmy begged hopefully.

# I believe so. You are laboring under a miscomprehension, hence your difficulty in solving this conundrum. The most salient point is that Moondoor has fixed parameters. Unmoveable rules and boundaries within which all occupants of this world must operate. Even my father. This is why, despite his vast capabilities, his power is represented as a power level in the same way as is true for every other character. #

“_Which is why he is represented as a level 1000 player? It isn’t simply an arbitrary figure meant to represent the fact he is vastly more powerful than everyone else?”_

# No. The power level he displays is accurate. Information such as that is presented to your interface by Moondoor, not by C.H.U.C.K. Where your information is lacking is your assumption that Amara is also a level 1000. Amara is somewhat less constrained by the parameters. She consequently is _more_ powerful than Chuck. She is a player level 1050. The difference is marginal, but significant nonetheless. In a war of attrition, she would eventually be the victor. When Richard Roman defeated her, he was a character level 1090. Again, not quite powerful enough to actually ‘kill’ her, but almost so. He definitely had the ability to defeat and imprison her. #

“_Of course,” _Jimmy said, as understanding struck him. “_Richard Roman would have supplied 900 levels as a Rank 9 Boss and his V.I. would have supplied a further 190 because the original seeded V.I.’s were fully co-operating with their hosts. There was no system of SP or FP back then_.”

# The current scenario, though, of FP being required if a Knight wishes to utilize the power of the seeded V.I.’s means that it is unlikely that any Knight other than Dean The Righteous will collect FP at all. Therefore, the maximum power of any current Knight will be 1000, even if they reach Rank 10.#

“_Unless Dean reaches Boss Rank 10_,” Jimmy pointed out. “_Dean has FP so he could become level 1190_.”

# Except for the salient point that Dean is not hosting his V.I. You are. #

“_So no matter which Knight wins, they can only have a maximum player level of 1000. And that is LESS powerful than Amara. So they can’t win. This is insane. None of this makes sense.”_

# Let me propose a different scenario entirely. One of the Knights other than Dean reaches Boss Rank 5. They are power level 500. Assume Dean has also reached Boss Rank 5. He has power level 500. Loki his placeholder V.I. vacates his body. Dean is seeded by a V.I. like myself. He has power level 690. He defeats the other Knight and becomes power level 1190. Considerably more powerful than either Amara or Chuck. #

“_Well, wouldn’t that be the ideal scenario?”_ Jimmy asked.

# One would have thought so. Except for the fact that Chuck deliberately ensured that could not happen, did he not? #

“_So I’m still no closer to understanding,”_ Jimmy griped.

# There is another scenario in which Dean the Righteous could become, at the minimum, power level 1100. #

Jimmy though about that for a moment, then his eyes went huge. “_That’s what he meant about having a ‘far more suitable long term host’. He is planning to seed himself into Dean.”_

# It is the only logical conclusion. Even if Dean merely levels himself to the maximum as a Rank One Boss and never enters combat with another Knight, his 100 levels added to Chuck’s 1000 will create a player level 1100 character. The most powerful one ever to exist. It is highly likely, however, that Dean’s proficiency within the ‘game’ will actually increase that level considerably should he raise himself up even only one or two further Ranks. #

“_I still don’t understand my part in this though,” _Jimmy admitted. “_Why bring me into the game at all? Why weren’t you simply seeded into Dean right from the beginning? Chuck could have then just swapped places with you at the appropriate time.”_

# I believe Dean would never have given permission to be seeded with me. It could not even have been achieved in the same surreptitious way as it was with you; ‘buried’ as a clause within a contract you signed without reading thoroughly. Dean’s brother is a lawyer who would undoubtedly have examined every line of Dean’s contract with precision. #

“_That makes sense,”_ Jimmy agreed_. “But, in which case, how does Chuck think he’s going to get inside Dean now?” _Then he groaned aloud as he realized the answer himself. “_That’s why Chuck wants my body, isn’t it? He intends to pretend to be me. To leave me trapped here, unable to warn Dean, whilst Chuck goes to join Dean in my Avatar. And Dean has already begun to trust YOU too. So there will come a point when Dean will be boxed into a corner, needing ‘your’ assistance, and because he trusts US, he will agree to the seeding. And that’s when Chuck will be able to enter him_ _because not only will Dean have given permission but he will also have the necessary FP for the game to accept him summoning ‘angelic assistance’_.”

# That is the conclusion I too have arrived at. Both you and I were merely chosen as a means by which Dean can be manipulated into accepting the seeding of a V.I. into himself. I had initially believed that you had been chosen because of the need to prove to Dean that V.I.’s such as myself can offer healing abilities to humans. However, I no longer believe that to be the case. Or, perhaps, that was always an optional play that my father believed he might require, but one he is now abandoning in favor of a different game plan. #

Jimmy considered that. It made sense that Chuck had devised a plan with multiple layers of complexity. What was the saying? No plan survives contact with the enemy. So Chuck had envisaged a myriad of ways his plan could be scuppered, had built redundancies into it, had devised a number of sub-plots and deviations that would still lead to his end goal.

But now Chuck had made a bold move that lay that actual goal bare.

Chuck wanted to take over the body of Dean Winchester.

And Jimmy had no idea _why._

More to the point, he didn’t CARE why.

Because it wasn’t going to happen, because Jimmy knew something that Chuck didn’t.

Still…

_“He’s your father, Castiel. Are you sure you’re on board for this?”_

# I am an Angel of the Lord God Chuck. My assigned role was to guide and assist the Righteous Boss. I take that role and responsibility seriously. #

Jimmy cringed.

# Even if my father does not. #

Did that mean…

# Therefore, my loyalty still lies with my charge, Dean The Righteous. #

Jimmy had to resist the urge to punch the air in triumph.

“_Will my idea work?”_

# Logically, it must do so. Chuck believes you are using a Gen 8 tank and so C.H.U.C.K. would face the same issue as myself should he enter you in his normal form. The only way in which C.H.U.C.K. could seed your avatar here and survive the transition back to your world is if he coats himself with a layer of code acceptable to a Gen 8 interface. Because you are actually using a rig that uses the Gen 9 protocols, it will read C.H.U.C.K.’s Gen 8 camouflage as evidence he is a Trojan. He will suffer the same fate as he wished upon me. However, you do understand that in pursuing this course of action, you will return to your world without me. Your T-cells will become active again. #

“_I know_,” Jimmy agreed. “_But I can’t see another way to do it. CHUCK won’t attempt to seed this body until he believes I have been seeded into the NPC body. So one of us has to let ourselves be scooped out and thrown into it. You’re a level 190 Angel. You land in that NPC and you’ll have the power to join Dean and really help him. And he’ll need all the help he can get. Besides, if I end up in that body, I’ll end up stuck in it forever, won’t I? And, no, whatever Chuck thinks, his idea of living in this 'heaven' is not better than me dying naturally in my world._”

# Then let us make it so. # Castiel agreed.

Later, it would occur to Jimmy that it should have been more difficult to achieve. Chuck should have been suspicious of his sudden change of heart. Should at least have taken the time to ‘analyze’ him. Had Chuck done so, and realized Castiel was still ‘on-board’, he would have easily seen the trap and avoided it.

But perhaps Mortimer was right all along that Chuck, for all of his years living amongst humans, had never even tried to learn to understand them.

And it helped, perhaps, that the solution Chuck had devised was as complex as it was simple.

Jimmy needed to be ‘scooped’ out of his avatar and deposited into the NPC at the exact same time as C.H.U.C.K. entered it.

So there was no time for C.H.U.C.K. to realize he’d mistakenly moved a V.I. into the NPC before he had already arrived in Jimmy’s body and discovered Jimmy was still in charge of it.

And there was, perhaps, a brief moment in which it could still have gone wrong.

If C.H.U.C.K. had managed to leap back out of Jimmy’s body in the few seconds it took for Jimmy to successfully log-out, then it would have all been for nothing.

Except Chuck, in his ‘Charles Shurley’ Avatar, believed he needed to log out of the game, return to the real world and activate the remote program to reinstate the ‘log-out’ protocols on the tank he thought Jimmy was using before Chuck, in his C.H.U.C.K. form, could leave Moondoor. So by the time both Chucks knew there was a problem, Jimmy and C.H.U.C.K. had already dematerialized.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???” Chuck roared at Castiel.

Castiel removed the wire-framed glasses and sweater vest from ‘his’ body, then offered his father a wry smile.

“You’re looking somewhat reduced, father,” he said mildly.

Chuck’s avatar was now registering as a mere Player Level 90.

Still significant in Moondoor terms, perhaps, but with C.H.U.C.K., his primary core, deleted, Chuck had lost permanent access to 90% of his original power.

And was now 101 power levels below Castiel.

With a squawk of fury, tempered by wise caution of his now far more powerful ‘son’; a son he had attempted to ‘kill’, Chuck chose the wisest course and simply logged out of the game completely.

Castiel stared morosely, not at the space that Chuck had vacated but the one where Jimmy had been standing before logging out. He wondered whether Jimmy had survived his journey home. Had the violent deletion of C.H.U.C.K.’s code from his avatar harmed his physical body? Had it caused damage to his heart in the same way as Chuck had worried Castiel’s deletion would have harmed Jimmy?

Castiel didn’t know.

Possibly, he might _never_ know.

All he did know was that to honor Jimmy, and fulfill his own oath to help Dean The Righteous, Castiel had a job to do.

With a snapping crackle reminiscent of a bolt of thunder, Castiel unfurled his wings and, eyes blazing azure fire, he soared up and burst through the library roof of ‘Jimmy’s heaven’ until he reached the sky above.

Then he began the long flight south to the Roadhouse, in search of his errant charge.


	61. Hello, Dean

“How good are you at dealing with a highly dangerous situation?” Sam asked, as the seatbelt warning lights came on and the pilot announced their imminent approach to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

“You’re asking ME that?” Charlie asked. “Honestly?”

“I’m being serious as a heart attack,” he told her grimly. “I need to know how cool you are under pressure.”

“Trust me, dude. I’m ice cold,” she replied. Then she lowered her voice so it was little more than a whisper. “Um, you do recall I’m travelling on a completely false passport, don’t you?”

Sam could have slapped himself. Although they hadn’t discussed that particular detail, he _had_ been well aware that Charlie Bradbury was the fresh identity of the supposedly deceased Celeste Middleton. So he should have put two and two together himself. Of course she was brazenly crossing borders on false paperwork but she was doing it with such supreme confidence that he hadn’t even wondered about the legitimacy of her passport.

So, yeah, she _was _ice cold under pressure.

“Good,” he said. “Because I need you to carry the bearer instruments through security when we land in Dallas.”

“Woah. You do realise that just having them in my hands will make _me_ the owner of RRE?”

“Yup. Nasty things aren’t they?” Sam agreed. “Until I can get Dean and mine’s ownership of the company formally notarised somewhere, those pieces of paper are totally vulnerable to being stolen and it would then be impossible for me to claim them back even in a Court of Law.”

“Ah, you figure if we split up going through security, if anyone is looking to steal them they will be on the lookout for _you_, not me?”

“Truthfully, I’m 99% certain RRE are still expecting me to check in at Belize City Airport. The flight I’m booked on doesn’t leave for another two hours. I can’t see how anyone would even suspect I’ve done this.”

Charlie nodded her firm agreement of the assessment. The truth was if she were a religious person she would have suspected a higher power had been helping them all along. They had arrived at Belize’s main bus depot literally two minutes before an express bus was departing for Guatemala City. A bus that had the Guatemala City Airport as one of its scheduled stops.

They had disembarked the bus just over three hours later and had entered the airport with less than ten minutes to spare before the check-in closed on a flight to Dallas. A flight that just happened to have two adjoining seats available. And now, less than three hours later, they were circling to land at Dallas and it was still only mid-afternoon.

It seemed impossible, even to her, that they had managed to traverse three countries in less than six hours.

So, no, she thought Sam’s estimate of 99% certainty was actually an understatement.

“But if you don’t think anyone’s waiting for us, why do you want _me_ to carry the bonds?”

“Because I am absolutely 100% certain I’ll get stopped and searched at customs,” he told her. “And I definitely don’t want to deal with questions about them.”

Charlie thought about that and cursed as she understood his meaning. “Of course you will,” she agreed. “You flew into Belize in the middle of the night and returned today from Guatemala. No checked luggage. No possible sane explanation you can give if you’re asked the reason for your trip. Drugs enforcement will be all over you like a rash. They’ll be absolutely convinced you’re internally carrying.”

“Exactly,” he agreed morosely.

“But the same is true of me. The fact I’m a girl won’t give me a free pass, you know.”

“True,” Sam agreed, “but if we go through customs separately, not acknowledging we know each other, then they are going to have to decide which one of us is the most likely suspect. They don’t just stop _everyone_ travelling in suspicious circumstances. They have to legitimise their suspicions or they’d be breaking the law themselves. So one of us has to make sure we’re the one who is stopped.”

“You’re planning on looking guilty as sin, so they don’t even bother looking at me?” Charlie asked incredulously.

Sam nodded. “Why not?” he shrugged. “Sure I’ll spend an awkward and slightly embarrassing couple of hours being questioned and searched and, most probably, internally scanned. But since I’m _not_ smuggling drugs that will be the full extent of it. They won’t even log a report in the system when I’m found to be completely innocent of wrongdoing. In the meantime, you can make the call to Dean and let him know what’s going on. Maybe he’ll have a suggestion where we go next. I don’t think going directly to California would be wise under the circumstances and the last thing I want to do is head towards his apartment. It’s probably the first place RRE would look for me when they realise I’m in the wind. Come to think of it, it’s probably Ash who will be the best source of info rather than Dean.He’s used to doing stuff under the radar, isn’t he? Maybe he’ll know somewhere or someone we can lie low with whilst we figure out the lay of the land.”

“I like the plan in principle,” Charlie said, “but how are you going to pull it off? Walking into the airport carrying a sign saying ‘I’m a drug mule’ would probably be too obvious.”

“Look at me,” Sam said.

Charlie turned her head curiously and then gasped out loud. Sam Winchester was as pale as a ghost. His eyes were huge, pupils dilated with terror. Sweat was beaded on his forehead and running down the sides of his face in rivulets.

“How the hell are doing that?” she demanded. “That’s not just fakery. That’s…hell, that’s Oscar-worthy, dude.”

Sam grinned, his face relaxing immediately into smug satisfaction at her reaction. “Remember me saying Dean is eidetic? Well, so am I. But my memory is auditory not visual. I can recall and replay anything I’ve ever heard and experience it so realistically that it feels as though it were the first time. For this, all I had to do was remember the worst phone conversation I ever had.”

“It must have been one fucked-up call,” Charlie breathed.

The smile slipped off Sam’s face and his eyes looked haunted once more. “It was the call when I learned about Dean’s accident,” he admitted. “Dad was dead, Dean was at best going to be left paralysed but at the time of that call, the docs weren’t sure he’d make it at all. It was the worst, most terrifying moment of my life.”

…

Ellen was either the saviour of his sanity or the embodiment of his worst nightmare, Dean decided.

The jury was still out on _which_ one though.

She had left him alone for maybe an hour when he’d arrived first thing that morning but, as time had continued to pass and Jimmy had still failed to arrive, she had planted her hands on her hips and said, “If you’re going to spend the whole damned day moping around like a kicked puppy, you can either make yourself useful or get the hell out of my bar, mister.”

So she had put Dean to work.

He’d spent hours collecting and cleaning glasses, fetching bottles from the cellar, serving customers and, since lunchtime, had been flipping burgers in the Roadhouse kitchen as Ellen’s unpaid short-order cook.

Every hour, on the hour, Ash had materialised just long enough to tell him there had been no further communication from either Charlie or Sam and then had logged off again.

Obviously, Dean could have just settled for agreeing that Ash would log in whenever either of them _did_ check in but, as frustrating as it was for Ash to continually visit and say ‘not yet’ it would have been a thousand times worse if he’d simply been left to fret alone for hours over the Sam situation.

Bad enough he was feeling sick with worry about Jimmy’s failure to arrive.

But he kept telling himself that Jimmy had _promised._

And, since Jimmy had _also_ clearly suggested that he was waiting for confirmation of ‘something’ before logging-in again, Dean told himself that the delay wasn’t something that Jimmy was necessarily in charge of. It was entirely likely that Jimmy was being held up by some third party’s failure to deliver said ‘something’. So Dean just needed to be patient.

Patience wasn’t one of Dean’s strengths.

Particularly when he was torn between two totally different worries in two totally separate worlds.

Not a phrase he’d ever imagined might be legitimately used.

So Ellen’s ‘busy-work’ was pretty much a godsend, really.

Until Jo came into the kitchen and said she’d take over the grill because he had another ‘visitor’.

Dean downed his spatula and raced back into the main bar area, expecting to see either Ash or Jimmy.

But his visitor was neither of them.

The person waiting for him at the Bar was Charlie Bradbury.

…

Unsurprisingly, Charlie’s last sight of Sam before she exited the customs area at DFW was Sam being unceremoniously escorted out of the hall by half a dozen uniformed officers.

She forced herself to ignore the commotion completely, not even sparing a single further glance in his direction.

It was almost 4pm by that time and she imagined Dean and Ash would probably be frantic with worry.

There had been neither time nor opportunity to call them earlier in the day. The only time she might have been able to phone them was on the bus ride from Belize to Guatemala City but she’d discovered, not surprisingly, that attempting to catch a cell phone signal en route had been an exercise in futility.

Ash picked up on the first ring and she quickly and only very briefly started to fill him in on what she and Sam had been doing. She had barely begun with the tale before he had interrupted her and suggested the story would be better told directly to Dean too.

The nearby Departures lounge had a concession where it was possible to rent out high-grade rigs so, just fifteen minutes later, Charlie donned a rented headset and haptic suit and gloves and arrived at the Roadhouse.

She had hardly begun explaining the situation to Dean before Ash had arrived too, saying he’d linked an alert from his phone to his rig in case Sam got out of customs earlier than expected and attempted to contact them.

Despite neither Dean nor Ash interrupting her, it still took over an hour to catch them up to speed on what Sam had uncovered.

“This is…um…nope, I’ve got nothing,” Dean said helplessly, too stunned by the news to even make an articulate protest.

Ash was equally nonplussed. “I don’t even know where to start sliding what we already know together with what Sam’s found out,” he admitted. “It feels like this whole situation should have come with cliff notes at the least, if not a whole damned manual.”

“Sam believes the only option is to take charge of RRE and then turn Moondoor off completely,” Charlie told them. “And as much as I hate to say it, I think he’s right. It’s not that I’m saying people like Ellen aren’t important too but, realistically, I don’t think we have another option. It’s triage, isn’t it?”

“She’s right,” Loki agreed morosely. “It’s what Chuck said before, isn’t it? Better to at least save you human players than let _everyone _die.”

Dean ignored him.

“I don’t accept that,” he told them all. “I’m not going to let it go down like that. Regardless of whether Chuck is responsible for my accident, and you can trust me I will sure as shit kick his ass if that’s true, Sam taking on RRE directly is not an option. We carry on with the original plan.”

“You’re still willing to risk the lives of all the human players just to save ‘people’ who are essentially nothing more than computer code?” Charlie demanded.

Dean shook his head. “Nope. I think the problem is that Chuck didn’t pick me as his knight just because of the Bearer Bonds. I think he understood me all too well. I think there are so many layers of complexity in this whole situation that I could try to understand it for a lifetime and still miss crucial aspects of all the wheels within wheels. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason he let Cain pick Sam, or at least his avatar, and Chuck picked _me_ was because he studied us both and realised the difference between us.”

“What difference?” Charlie asked.

“Like I’ve said before, Sam is ‘good people’. He will always make a decision based on what is best for the majority. But he’s dogmatic. He’ll decide what he believes is ‘right’ and he’ll pursue achieving it with a dogged, unswerving persistence. He’ll prioritise that goal over any selfish desires. He’ll sacrifice his own life if necessary and never even hesitate about that cost. He’ll jump head first into danger, not caring about the consequences, to do whatever he believes is the ‘right thing’.”

“And you wouldn’t?” Charlie asked sceptically. “Because this whole Dean The Righteous gig you have going on here begs to differ.”

Dean smiled at her and shrugged self-effacingly. “There’s a fundamental difference between us, Charlie, and that’s that I might be perfectly willing to sacrifice my _own_ life to save _everybody_ in Moondoor, digital and flesh alike, but I will burn the whole damned universe to the ground before I let anything happen to my little brother.

“And it wouldn’t surprise me if Chuck knew that about me. Knew that if it came down to the wire and the only way to stop this train was to let Sam throw himself onto the tracks, that my reaction was always going to be ‘hell, no’.”

“Sam’s already realised his initial idea of just walking into RRE headquarters as the new owner would probably be suicide,” Charlie admitted. “We’re trying to find a way to do things remotely. Get the bonds notarised well away from California, before RRE know what’s happening.”

“Smart. But it won’t wash. There’s no conceivable way of Sam doing this without Cain sending a hit-squad to take him down,” Ash argued. “Even if he manages to survive long enough to get the bonds notarised, Cain can immediately throw a series of legal obstacles in his path. Sure, Sam would be guaranteed to win any legal argument, since the bonds are authentic, but he’d be forced to physically attend at least one hearing to prove their veracity . The moment Sam shows his face in public, Cain will throw everything he has at him. He won’t even necessarily do it as a direct attack. We already know Cain has guys who specialise in explosions and fires.”

”But if Cain kills Sam, he can’t take over his body can he?” Charlie pointed out.

”So he realises he needs Dean instead, makes plans to get him into the game. Discovers he’s _already _ in the game and Bob’s your uncle,” Ash countered dryly.

“And whilst all that is happening, the game continues running anyway,” Charlie mused. “So there was never any way to utilise the bonds quickly enough to stop what’s happening here.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Ash agreed.

“So why did The Reaper imply there was? Why send him off in a panic to fetch them?” She demanded.

“To make someone _else _panic,” Dean suggested darkly. “That fucker just painted a target on Sam’s back for no other reason than to cause someone _else_ to react.”

Ash and Charlie considered that for a moment then nodded their agreement with Dean’s assessment of the situation.

“Know the best part about all this?” Dean snarled. “When it’s all over, l’ll be able to use _my_ share of ‘Campbell Holdings’ to roll into that basement and pull the plug on _that_ asshole,” he promised darkly.

“In the meantime though, what do Sam and I do?” Charlie asked. “RRE are going to be after us. And if they get hold of Sam and force him into the game, then he’ll land in his avatar, Cain will be able to take him over and then we’re all fucked. Because, let’s face it, you’re never going to fight _Sam_, are you? Even if he’s acting as Cain’s meat puppet.”

“Thanks for that mental imagery,” Dean snapped. “But you’re right. We need to find somewhere safe for you both to hide. And quickly, because it’s not going to take long, once RRE realise you’ve left Belize, for them to track the route you took and find you. You need to get away from Dallas as soon as possible. But I have no idea where you should run to. Any ideas, Ash?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Ash admitted. “You’re already at the airport so I suggest you get on an internal flight _anywhere_ for now. Just make sure it’s a short hop. Couple of hours maximum. Don’t run the chance of RRE managing to get ahead of you whilst you’re airborne. Then, as soon as you land, get the hell out of dodge and swap cities again before stopping. Renting a car is a no,no. Either hotwire something, buy a car for cash or get on a greyhound.”

“Sioux Falls is only a two hour flight from Dallas,” Ellen said, as she dropped fresh beers on their table.

Dean’s arm shot out and grabbed her wrist, fixing her in place. “Care to tell us how you know that?”he growled dangerously.

“Care to remove your hand before I break it?” she replied, coolly. “And I know that because it’s where your Guildmaster lives. Honestly, none of you idjits have a clue, do you? Don’t any of you fools know that the first thing you do when threatened by stronger players is ask your R10 for guild assistance?”

“I appreciate your help,” Charlie told the NPC, “but the threat isn’t to our game characters.”

“Do I look like I was programmed yesterday?” Ellen sniffed haughtily. “Bobby Singer, your Guildmaster, lives in Sioux Falls in _your_ world. Go see him. He’ll help you. That’s what Guildmasters do, isn’t it?”

“How do we know we can trust him?” Dean demanded.

Ellen shrugged. “You’re going to have to trust _someone,” _she pointed out. “Might as well be someone with a vested interest in saving the lives of people such as me.”

Which was a good point, Dean accepted. If the rumours were true about Bobby and Ellen, then the mysterious Bobby Singer was probably the only other real life character likely to share his determination to save Moondoor in its entirety. Was that good enough odds to risk Sam’s life on though?

He supposed, reluctantly, that for lack of any better option, he was going to have to trust Sam and Charlie to be smart enough to make their own judgements and handle Singer with extreme caution. It was, at least, a direction they could head in that was so inconceivable that RRE wouldn’t anticipate it.

“I’ll head back then and find Sam. Hopefully he’s escaped the Drug Enforcement guys by now,” Charlie said brightly.

“Lose your cell, Charlie,” Ash suggested. “The minute you and Sam get on another plane together, RRE will be able to link you with him. Don’t leave any breadcrumbs to let them follow you to _him_.”

“Damn, “ she cursed. She turned to Dean, “you’d damned well better survive this thing, Dean, because at this rate, between lost tech and plane fares, I’m going to be bankrupt before it’s all over. I’ll be first in line with my begging bowl when you and Sam kick Cain’s ass and become multi-gazillionaires.”

Ash waited until she left, then turned to Dean. “You coming, bro? It’s gone 5. I can’t see him turning up now. We can try again tomorrow. Leave a message for him with Ellen, just in case, and come home, Dean. Get some rest.”

Dean thought about it, then shook his head. There was nothing he could do for Sam by logging out and although he suspected it was pointless to wait any longer, his gut insisted that the act of leaving would be one of psychologically giving up on Jimmy forever.

“I’m going to keep the faith a bit longer,” he told Ash. “Go back. I’ll give it another couple of hours before calling it a day.”

Ash nodded, his expression a mix of concern and understanding, but he just patted Dean on the shoulder and walked out of the Roadhouse in Charlie’s wake without further comment.

Ellen bustled over, clearing glasses and replenishing Dean’s own drink.

This time she made no snide comments about him ‘moping’, but just left him to drink in peace.

Eight o clock came and went.

Followed by Nine.

Then Ten.

And finally, Dean pushed back his chair and rose as he accepted reality.

Jimmy wasn’t coming.

So much for his ‘solemn promise’.

And accepting that, believing that, shouldn’t have hurt so damned much. He barely knew the guy after all.

Dean didn’t feel angry.

Didn’t even feel anything he would describe as disappointed.

He just felt empty.

Bereft.

But he was Dean Winchester, he reminded himself, so he put his game face on. Politely thanked Ellen for her drinks and ‘hospitality’, and then, his expression fixed into a deliberately careless smile, he sauntered out of the bar into the cool, darkness of the desert night.

And, as he prepared to mentally press the log-out icon on his interface, he finally heard a deep voice utter the two words he had waited for all day.

“Hello, Dean.”


	62. Bobby

By the time Sam and Charlie landed in Sioux Falls, they had both been awake for pushing thirty-six hours and, between lack of sleep and adrenaline crash, were reaching the point of being punch drunk with exhaustion.

Both wanted nothing more than to hail a cab straight to the address Ash had eventually managed to provide for the mysterious Bobby Singer. Though, to be fair, the fact they hadn’t been able to obtain that information from him sooner was mainly due to the fact that Charlie had thrown her cellphone away in Dallas and the burner phones they had both purchased before boarding their next flight still required charging. It had turned out charging ports weren’t available in cattle class. Something that Charlie had taken for granted but Sam, far more familiar with flying business class, had been nonplussed by. So it wasn’t until they landed and called Ash from a payphone that they knew their actual destination.

Sam was feeling pretty skeptical about the information provided. He wasn’t certain that ‘Singer Salvage’ sounded the right kind of location for a digital gaming GuildMaster, but he respected Ash’s google-fu too much to suggest the information might be wrong. Besides, Charlie had 100% faith in Ash’s info and Sam didn’t have enough energy to even think about getting into an argument with her. So taking a taxi directly to the salvage yard from the SF airport would have been easy and logical.

Except for the small matter that there was probably going to be a small army of homicidal RRE security officers on their tail in the very imminent future. Anyone tracking them to the Sioux Falls regional airport would check the car rentals companies, then naturally move on to the cab firms’ passenger records next.

So although they did catch a cab, they took one into Sioux Falls itself, then hopped on three different random buses moving in random directions, before catching a second cab, from a different company, to their actual destination.

The process took over an hour and just added more miserable exhaustion to their already shattered bodies.

So Sam was dog-tired, his clothes itchy and uncomfortable after wearing them for two days and his legs aching from sitting for too long in awkward cramped conditions. He decided he was far too tall to ever contemplate taking another trip crammed into an economy airplane seat.

After paying the cabbie in cash and watching him drive away, the pair turned to view the ramshackle entrance to the scrapyard and Sam could no longer prevent himself blurting, “Are you absolutely sure this is the right place?”

Charlie just shrugged, too exhausted to care one way or the other. It was gone 8pm, the day was starting to fade into twilight and the scrapyard, already uninviting in daylight, would take on the cast of a spooky automotive graveyard when night fell.

Sam met her eyes and nodded his acceptance that they had little choice at this point except to go up to the house and knock the door. Even if it was the wrong place, they needed access to a phone to call a new cab to take them to a motel.

“It’s kinda like a horror movie scene,” Charlie muttered, as they stepped towards the wooden house with its peeling paint and broken shutters. The house was completely in darkness. Given the rapidly encroaching night, the lack of any interior lighting suggested the building was unoccupied.

Except the front door opened abruptly and some instinct warned Sam to move a split second before the stillness of the evening was shattered with the sound of a shotgun firing. Sam flung himself at Charlie, knocking her down and then landing on top of her. She landed with a pained ‘oooph’ as his not inconsiderable weight crushed her face into the dusty driveway. Sam looked several feet to the right, where a fresh hole had ripped into the carcass of a car, even as he heard the unmistakable sound of another cartridge being loaded into a gun.

He could barely hear himself think over the rapid thunder of his own heart but sense asserted enough for him to realize that the shot had either merely been one of warning or the person firing at them had seriously bad aim. Either way, there was less danger here than the fired shotgun had initially suggested.

So slowly, carefully, he rolled off the crushed Charlie and raised himself up into a kneeling position, being shrewd enough to keep both of his hands in plain sight to prove he was unarmed himself.

“We’re looking for Bobby Singer,” he called out. “We don’t want any trouble. We just need to talk to him.”

There was a long, pregnant pause, then the shooter moved forward until Sam could see a vague shape in the shadows of the dark doorway.

Sam blinked uncertainly, unsure whether it was a problem with perspective or if the shooter was a _child_ , and then his eyes adjusted enough that he could see the figure more clearly and understood the shooter wasn’t _short,_ he was _seated. _ He looked late-middle-aged, though it was hard to tell for sure in the falling darkness, particularly since his head was covered with a baseball cap and most of his features were concealed by a beard.

Sam rose cautiously to his feet, keeping his movements deliberately slow as he lowered a hand to assist Charlie to rise too.

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my property?” the man in the wheelchair demanded, his voice gruff and as unwelcoming as the scowl on his face.

“I’m Charlie Bradbury,” Charlie called out, her voice remarkably chirpy considering her face was covered in pale brown dirt. “This is Sam Winchester. We’re looking for Bobby Singer. Is that you, Sir?”

“None of your beeswax,” he snorted. “I got no time to talk to illiterate idjits.”

“Huh?” Sam asked, not very helpfully under the circumstances.

“Well, I’m kindly assuming you can’t read. Otherwise, I’d have to assume you _deliberately_ just walked past two signs sayin’ ‘keep out’. In which case, I’d be within my rights to shoot you for real.”

“Ellen sent us,” Charlie blurted quickly. “I’m Hunters Guild. I need R10 assistance.”

“You smokin’ crack or something?” the man huffed. “Does this look like a bloody digital world to you?”

“It’s definitely got a genuine ‘Destruction Derby’ feel to it,” Charlie replied, with a cocky smile, “but the fact you caught my reference seems pretty damned close to 100% proof you’re the Bobby Singer we’re looking for.”

“Never said I wasn’t,” Singer huffed. “Why not be like normal people? Send me a PM and I’ll get back to you.”

And, with that, he rolled his chair backward, then slammed the door shut in their faces.

Charlie and Sam just stared at each other helplessly for a moment, then Sam squared his shoulders, his expression one of resolve, and he strode up to the house and banged politely, but firmly, on the door.

It swung open.

Sam turned to Charlie and shrugged his uncertainty. Singer hadn’t locked the door behind him. He hadn’t even firmly closed it on the latch. The minute Sam’s knuckles had connected with it, it had opened.

Like an invitation. 

Or not. 

Like a trap, maybe?

Or was that just tiredness and paranoia speaking?

Sam wasn’t sure he knew where one ended and the other started. Singer _had_ just shot at them.

“Should I go in?” he asked Charlie.

“Hell if I know,” she said. She hopped up the steps to join him and rapped her own knuckles a couple of times on the open door. “Hello?” she called out into the hallway. Unlit, it was deeply shadowed by the falling darkness and appeared cold and unwelcoming as her ‘Hello’ echoed down the empty corridor.

Singer didn’t reply.

“Oh, hell, I’m so damned tired I’m actually past caring whether this is a trap or not,” Sam decided. “I’m going in,” he added, his voice raised for the latter to make sure that the occupant, wherever he’d disappeared to, heard him. Even so, he half-expected an up and personal reunion with the shotgun as he turned a corner to follow the corridor into the interior of the house.

“Huh, that’s weird,” he muttered, coming to a halt.

“Ow,” Charlie said, as she bumped into his back. “What’s weird?”

Sam pointed at the empty wheelchair lying on its side, one of its wheels still spinning. It had been abandoned next to an open doorway that revealed a steep stairwell down into a basement. A glow of light from the bottom of the stairs suggested the totally mundane reason for no lights being on upstairs was simply that Singer was busy doing something _downstairs._

“What the fuck?” she breathed.

“Look, maybe you should stay here while I go down and check it out,” Sam suggested.

“Yeah? No fucking way. I’ve seen this movie. Split up in the haunted house and, wham, you both get taken out by a chainsaw,” Charlie snorted. She skipped past him and headed down the stairs so quickly that he had to run to catch her up.

This time Charlie’s “OW,” was because he ran into _her_ when she stopped dead at the bottom of the stairs.

Blinking in astonishment, Sam stared at the sight that had transfixed her.

The basement was completely empty.

Except for a bare, swinging overhead lightbulb, the room held nothing but a series of empty shelves.

What had caused Charlie to stop abruptly, however, was that the floor sloped at a slight angle towards a grated drain hole the size of a manhole cover. That in itself wasn’t peculiar. The water table was often higher than basements were deep, so lots of old houses had drains to handle possible flooding. What was peculiar about Singer’s drain was that there was a dim but distinct glow of light emerging from it.

Sam crossed and prised at the grill. It immediately snapped open on a spring-loaded mechanism and revealed a metal ladder descending even deeper into the earth.

“You think he went down here?” Charlie asked.

“There’s a light on down there…somewhere….” Sam replied, though the way the first rung of the ladder was located a good three feet lower than the grill meant that without that reflected light from below, it would have been impossible to see at all. The light definitely appeared to be a deliberate beacon luring them downwards.

“It’s like a dungeon sub-routine in a game,” Charlie remarked. “We have to decide, go down or go home, I think. But we get no clue as to what waits at the bottom. Could be a prize. Could be a man-eating dragon. It’s a test, I think.”

“And people think it’s weird I don’t voluntarily choose to play games like these,” Sam muttered.

Charlie shrugged and grinned. “Fortune favors the brave, Sam,” she said, lowering herself into the open grille. She struggled for a moment, having to hold her weight on her hands as her feet tried to reach the first step of the ladder, then she cautiously took a step downwards, holding on to the edge of the hatch with her fingers until she could move down one more step and then bring her right hand down to grab the first rung which was now at her chest height. “It’s a bit awkward,” she warned him. “Needs four strong limbs,” she added, significantly.

She released her left hand from the edge of the grille and, as though triggered by a sensor, the spring mechanism snapped the grille shut over her head.

Sam pursed his lips thoughtfully. That at least explained how the grille had been closed even if Singer _had _already descended the ladder. It added credence to the idea that the older man _had_ disappeared down the hole. He shook himself, realizing he needed to get moving if he was going to catch up with the irrepressible Charlie who, clearly, had absolutely no sense of self-preservation given the way she kept leaping into things feet first.

Literally in this case.

So he re-opened the grille and made his own descent. The storm drain was a far tighter fit for him. Claustrophobically so. He doubted there was more than a spare inch of room either side of his shoulders as he climbed slowly downwards. It did, of course, mean there was very little chance of falling, so there was that to be grateful for. But the air was thick with the smell of dank earth and his body blocked all of the light beneath him, so it still felt like a terrifying descent into the underworld.

Sam counted 35 steps before his feet touched firm ground again. He assumed that meant he was at least 50 feet below ground, given that the floor of the basement itself must have been 10 or 12 feet underground.

“It’s an old mine shaft, I think,” Charlie told him, as he turned to face her. “Quartzite probably, given the region, rather than gold.”

“Makes sense,” he agreed. “Sioux Falls had a huge Quartzite mining industry in the nineteenth century. The land around here is probably riddled with old mine works.”

“Come on,” she urged, “the light is coming from up there.” She led the way along the mineshaft in the direction of the light until they reached a… well… Sam thought the only appropriate term was ‘cavern’ although this, like the shaft, had the clear marks of being man-made, hewn deliberately out of the rock, despite being huge enough to house a football match.

It was immediately obvious why there was enough illumination from this ‘room’ to light the entire shaft they’d traversed.

“I’ve done a lot of recent work on it, obviously,” Singer said, “but the structure was already here. Most of this particular space was opened up for secret storage back in the 1930’s. My family has owned this land back to the original mining days, but the money that built the house I live in today came from Prohibition.”

“You’re a Bond villain,” Sam told Singer, with bemused appreciation. “All you need to do is lose the baseball cap and add a cat and you’d be Blofeld.”

The entire stone ‘room’ was lined with banks of wall to wall monitors, all showing various live-action feeds from within Moondoor and Bobby Singer was sat on a wheeled office chair, whizzing between various keyboards in response to onscreen messages.

“You’re not using VR,” Charlie muttered. “You’re doing everything old-style. Is this how you play the game, Mr. Singer? As an observer rather than an active participant?”

“My name’s Bobby,” the guy grumped. “Not Mr. Singer. Not Sir. Just Bobby.”

Sam was just glaring at the way Bobby was using his legs freely to assist as zipped around the room’s uneven stone floor on the office chair. “Was the wheelchair upstairs your sick idea of humor?” he demanded angrily. “Because I don’t find it ‘funny’ when people think disabilities are some kind of costume they can wear when it suits them. Faking disability is offensive to me.”

“I don’t think a charge of cultural appropriation works with disabilities,” Charlie pointed out quietly.

“It damned well should do,” Sam growled.

“Unknot your panties,” Bobby huffed, flicking his hand to gesticulate towards a framed faded newspaper printout hung on one of the rough-hewn walls.

‘Sioux Falls rejoices as Local Hero returns from Vietnam’ the headline proclaimed, with a sepia-tinged photograph of a much younger Bobby Singer being wheeled off a transport plane. In the body of the attached article, the reporter detailed how Robert Singer had been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for an act of heroism during the Battle of Firebase Ripcord but had been severely wounded in a mortar attack and had permanently lost the use of his legs.

“You’re using your damned legs right now,” Sam protested.

“Yup,” Bobby said, standing up out of his chair and walking across the room unashamedly. “Been cured best part of twelve years now,” he agreed.

“So why are you still using the wheelchair?” Sam demanded.

“Yeah, can see how that one would go,” Bobby mocked. “Can imagine the headlines now. ‘Local Hero miraculously cured. Was it divine intervention, a satanic pact or have aliens visited Sioux Falls?’,” he mocked. 

“Good point,” Charlie agreed, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, ‘because any of the above would still sound more reasonable than the idea of you hosting an artificial intelligence, I guess.”

_“What?” _Sam demanded incredulously.

“It’s the only thing that fits, isn’t it? He’s like Mortimer Blake. Or maybe Richard Roman and Cain, only presumably not actually _dead. _ Unless, um, _are _you dead?”

“Do I _look_ dead, snookums?” Bobby snorted.

“I refuse to believe that he’s hosting an A.I. too,” Sam replied firmly.

Charlie gaped at him. “But you’re the one who told _me _about Mortimer Blake and Cain. How can you believe their tale and not Bobby’s?”

“We know about the original programmers and the Knights of Hell scenario. That’s how Cain ended up in Roman’s body and we also know how The Reaper convinced Mortimer Blake to let himself be ‘seeded’ and I have first-hand evidence that prototype tanks exist in the Woolfe Building which is how Blake and The Reaper got ‘in bed’ together. But there’s no scenario that fits the idea of one of Roman’s A.I.’s somehow ending up inside a Scrap metal dealer from Sioux Falls,” Sam argued. “Even one with a secret bunker. Unless you’re suggesting it could have happened just because he plays inside Moondoor. If that were the case, I reckon we’d be tripping over hosted A.I.’s all over the place. My understanding is it can’t even happen with a commercially available immersion tank.”

“Funnily enough, son, you’re both right and wrong. It can’t happen with anything other than a Gen9 tank, or their prototypes, and _neither_ are commercially available, as you say,” Bobby interrupted. “However, it just so happens that tanks, like every other consumable item, wear out or get broken, or even _burned_. Any guesses as to what happens to scrapped immersion tanks?”

“Noooo,” Sam said, blinking in astonishment. “The explanation can’t possibly be that easy.”

“Most things are, ya know? Easy I mean. Straightforward. Black and white. Of course, that ain’t to say they are necessarily _probable_. I mean, you gotta ask yourself, what’s the odds of a batch of scrap metal in Portland ending up 1500 miles away in a scrapyard in Sioux Falls? Or that there would be enough good parts left in nine, badly burned scrap tanks to make one fully functioning one? Or, even, that the scrapyard would be owned by someone not only bored enough to attempt it but having the knowledge and ability to do so?”

“Were you a gamer?” Charlie asked.

Bobby snorted his amusement at the idea. “I was a mechanical engineer. Got into electronics sideways, usually being on the wrong side of a bomb that needed disarming. I didn’t have the foggiest what the tanks were and I’d never heard of Moondoor back then. Didn’t matter that I didn’t. Took me best part of three years to get that bastard running. When I finally got the damned thing working, I naturally reset it to its ‘factory default’. I didn’t end up at its _last_ log-in destination. I ended up at its _first_ destination.” He paused significantly and raised a querying eyebrow in Sam’s direction.

“Afterlife. You ended up in Afterlife, with the Reaper. You _are_ like Mortimer Blake. You did a deal with ‘Death’.”

“Better than a deal with the devil,” Bobby quipped. “But, yeah. The old bastard and I came to an understanding. I got my legs back. He gets to see through my eyes. Thought it was weird as fuck, at first. Actually, thought I was dreamin’ when I made the actual deal. Funny thing ‘bout paralysis though. You still wake up every morning and try to move before you ‘member you can’t. So I was half-way to empty the snake before I ‘membered I couldn’t walk. I was fixed ‘fore I even realized I’d _really _done a deal.”

Sam frowned. “You don’t sound like him,” he said. “Sure there’s a difference between The Reaper and Mortimer Blake but, well, there’s more similarity than difference. Nothing about your speech patterns remind me of _either_ of them.”

Bobby shrugged. “That’s cos I ain’t like Blake. I don’t need to keep the deal, do I? I didn’t have an incurable disease. I had an injury. So I’m fixed. I coulda told the Reaper to take a hike. But a man who don’t keep his word is lower than a snake’s belly in my book. So I let ‘im stay, but on my terms. He rides me. He ain’t _ridin’_ me. There’s a difference.”

“You haven’t _merged_ with him,” Charlie mused. “You’re co-habiting but he’s just a lodger and you’re the homeowner. You call the shots.”

Bobby laughed. “Like to think so,” he agreed, “but I reckon he still calls the shots in his own way. You two are a case in point, ain’tchya?”

Sam glowered. “Can he hear me now? Because I have a few choice things I want to say to him.”

“Doubt he’s got his ears on at all,” Bobby replied, with a shrug. “Some far more important stuff going down right now. You’re on the backburner, I reckon.”

“More important? The bastard just painted a target on my back and sent me off on a fool’s errand to fetch some worthless damned bonds that are probably just going to get me killed. He lied to me.”

“Happens,” Bobby shrugged. “Ya think every foot soldier gets cliff notes with their orders? ‘sides, what do you expect? He ain’t human, boy. He don’t think like you or me. I ain’t sayin’ he’s _right._ But don’t you go thinkin’ he’s some evil villain plotting mayhem either. Quite the opposite, really. The Reaper is all about ‘order’. He likes things nice an’ ordered an’ tidy. Hates it when folk mess stuff up. Human or Digital folk. He doesn’t make a distinction. Stuff is out of whack and he wants it back nice ‘n shipshape. Problem is, he don’t care if he breaks a few eggs along the way as long as he ends up with a nice lookin’ omelet.”

“And I’m one of those eggs?” Sam asked.

“Dunno,” Bobby admitted, with a shrug. “Depends really. I think he’s hanging his hat on your brother. So I guess the real question becomes whether you’re going to be an asset or a liability to Dean. Still, Dean’s a stubborn, proud little cuss, so maybe it don’t make no overall difference which way you jump.”

“How do you know anything about my brother?” Sam demanded suspiciously. “If your ‘aspect’ isn’t merged with you, how do you know anything about all this?”

“We _talk_ ya damned fool,” Bobby snorted. “But, as for Dean, come with me.”

He led them out of the cavern in the opposite direction, until he reached a point in the mineshaft where another metal ladder was embedded into the wall. “Nip up there, Sam, and take a look,” he suggested. “Then we’ll talk.”

He turned then and walked back in the direction of the cavern. 

Sam and Charlie exchanged a look, then Sam shrugged and shimmied up the ladder, with Charlie close on his heels.

They emerged inside a tall, wooden building that Sam assumed was the barn-like structure he’d seen on the far end of the Scrapyard. As soon as they climbed out of the grille that covered the shaft entrance, overhead lights automatically switched on to reveal the interior of the barn. It was largely empty, save for some oil drums and various pieces of a dismantled engine. In the precise middle of the barn, however, there was a single large shape covered with a green tarpaulin. The tarp was clearly covering a car, though why it was inside the protection of the building rather than outside with the dozens of other vehicles, was unclear.

Until Sam walked over and lifted the tarpaulin.

“Wow,” Charlie said. “That’s gorgeous.”

“It’s impossible,” Sam gasped.

“What is?” Charlie demanded, as Sam double-checked the registration plate, then went visibly pale and swayed on his feet.

“It’s Baby,” he choked.

“Huh?” she asked, with a helpless shrug.

Sam swallowed heavily a couple of times, struggling to find the words, but then said, “This is a ’67 Chevy Impala. Her name’s Baby. She was my Dad’s only pride and joy. The only thing he cared about, really. It was the car he was driving the night he died. The night Dean got paralyzed.”

“But it’s cherry,” she argued. “Completely mint.”

“That’s what’s impossible,” Sam said. “Not only that it’s here, but that it looks like _this_. Baby was crushed like a concertina in the accident. Then they cut her roof off to get Dean out. She was literally in pieces. Dean and I have been arguing for ten years about him throwing money away paying storage fees for a hunk of useless twisted metal instead of just scrapping the damned thing. If he’d ever made the decision to get her restored, he’d have damned well told me. I’d have still been pissed he’d wasted money restoring her but it would have at least made more sense to me that he was paying storage on a _restored _vehicle.”

“Let’s go see what Bobby has to say,” Charlie replied sensibly. “I think it’s becoming increasingly obvious that none of what’s happening is a coincidence. So this has to mean something significant too and we’re both too tired to even start trying to come up with any hypotheses ourselves.”

They walked in to Bobby waving them to be quiet for a moment. He was using talk to type software to apparently harangue one of the guild members who was messaging him from in-game.

“No, I said it was a Kelpie, ya idjit. Not a Selkie…. The difference?... Seriously?... put it this way, if it looks like a shoo-in to run the Kentucky Derby it ain’t a damned Selkie… Yup…. Silver bullets will do fine… yup… just like a werewolf… okay… yeah… whatever.”

He pulled off his headset and tossed it away in obvious disgust. “I swear, if they gave awards for stupid,” he muttered. “Going to switch to PM mode only. You can talk now,” he offered.

“Why do you have Dean’s car? And why does she look mint?” Sam demanded, getting right down to the heart of the matter.

“Two questions with two different answers. The answer to the second one is that your brother is a stubborn, proud cuss, as I said before,” Bobby replied. “But as to why I have the car at all? Well, I guess she came from the same place the immersion tanks did. Which makes you wonder, don’t it? Nah, that was rhetorical. Fact is, bout ten years ago I, by which I mean Singer Salvage, managed to score the annual contract for rescue and recovery for the entirety of Interstate 29.

“Made no sense. Hadn’t even tendered for it. Came out of the blue and I ended up having to employ half a dozen guys to fulfill it. And that’s how I got your brother’s car. Arrived here in a dozen pieces, with barely anything worth salvaging out the carcass. So I’m planning to strip it and melt it down, when I get a call from a kid lying in a hospital bed down near Lawrence saying he wants me to store the damned thing instead of scrapping it.

“Thing is, I already looked up the accident details. Classic car like that, well, circumstances of it getting totaled was interesting, ya know? So I knew what happened. Knew your brother wasn’t ever going to need that car back. So I tried to do him a favor. Couldn’t talk him out of keeping it but I quoted a stupid rate for storing it, thinking that would make him change his mind. Well, that backfired on me. Damned fool just kept sending the damned checks.

“After a few years, I tried lowering the rate just ‘cos I was feeling so damned bad about the profit I was making but Dean Winchester was too fucking proud to let me do it. Said he didn’t need no ‘charity’ and no, the car wasn’t getting scrapped neither. 

“So that’s when I decided ‘what the hell’ and put all the extra money towards sourcing parts to restore the damned thing. Finally got her finished last Fall. Been thinking that one of these days I might mosey on down to Lawrence in the damned thing and leave it in front of his apartment building with a bow on.

“Instead, I find out the kid has been suckered into Moondoor to ‘save the world’ and then _you_ turn up on my doorstep. So, I guess, if any of us survive this monumental fuckup going on in Moondoor at the moment, you can drive the damned thing back to him yourself.”

“So, um, why did you shoot at us?” Charlie asked, with an awkward smile.

“I shot at _him_, girlie,” Bobby replied. “Wanted to know what he was made of. Wasn’t worried ‘bout _you_.”

“Because I’m a woman?” Charlie demanded angrily.

“Because you’re Celeste Middleton,” Bobby replied easily. “I already know what _you’re_ made of.”

She blinked at him stupidly. “How do you know that?”

“Mortimer Blake likes you,” he said, with a shrug. “He talks about you a lot. Might have a crush.”

Charlie grimaced slightly.

Bobby smirked. “Yeah, I know,” he chuckled. “He sure ain’t no-one’s idea of Prince Charming.”

“Oh, it’s nothing personal. I like Mr. Blake. He’s a very fascinating man. It’s just I’m more into _Princess_ Charming,” Charlie clarified.

“Okay, let’s get down to business,” Bobby said, his expression becoming soberer. “If Ellen sent you to contact me in Real Life, you must be in some serious shit.”

They briefly filled him in on what had brought them to his door.

He listened to them carefully, only interrupting briefly once or twice for clarification of various facts, and then, when they finished, he said. “Nope, I got nothing.”

“You can’t help us?” Charlie asked, her shoulders sagging with disappointment.

“I need to talk to The Reaper, if I can get his attention. See what he’s willing to tell me,” Bobby replied. “Seems like the best thing you can do for now is lie low anyway. You’re maybe a six-hour drive from Lawrence so, even if RRE track you to Sioux Falls they’ll probably figure you’re just using a convoluted route to reach Dean. It will probably take a day or two before they backtrack and start looking for you ‘round these parts.

“You can stay here tonight. Get some sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow. There’s food in the kitchen and spare bedrooms upstairs. Cupboard at top of the stairs; help yourselves to sheets and shit. Charlie, third door on the left, first floor, you’ll find some clothes. You’re a lot skinnier than my Karen was, but I figure there’s got to be something there will do in a pinch. Not a chance in hell I’ve got anything to fit _you_, Sam. So you’ll just have to wrap yourself in a towel or something while you put your clothes in the wash. I’ll haul ‘em out and throw them in the dryer for you later. We’ll talk more in the morning.”


	63. A real boy.

“Hello, Dean.”

Just two words and Dean was filled with both relief and confusion because the voice was that of Jimmy and yet…not. A little too deep, a little too resonant, as though Jimmy had gargled with razor blades, smoked a dozen Marlboro and added a sprinkle of stage presence before arriving.

And, even with the reflected light from the Roadhouse casting only a dim orange glow over the shadowy darkness, Dean could see well enough to realise Jimmy’s avatar was just a tad off too… a little too thin, a little too pale… and yet, despite those both being differences that should diminish him, instead Jimmy glowed with an unfamiliarity vibrant affect. There was something peculiarly virtuous about his demeanour, something that spoke of restrained power and noble purpose.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Dean demanded. “Yesterday you were all buff and tan, today you look like the thin white duke.”

“This is a different avatar,” Castiel began but, before he could explain further, Dean continued speaking.

“Not that it’s bad,” he continued hurriedly. “You carry the goth theme well, bud. But I was kinda used to the other one and…woah…where the fuck did you get all that power from? Player level 191? Jeez, Jimmy, how many fucking packs did you buy last night?”

“I’m not Jimmy,” Castiel interrupted bluntly.

Dean startled, frowning with confused disbelief.

“You’re not Jimmy? Then who the fuck are you? Jimmy’s anorexic twin?” He demanded sarcastically.

“I’m Castiel,” ‘Jimmy’ said, and just for a second his eyes blazed with an all too familiar cerulean bioluminescence to emphasise the truth of his words.

Stunned and disconcerted, Dean retreated into anger. “So where the fuck is Jimmy?” He snarled, advancing on Castiel angrily. “What have you done to him?”

Castiel’s eyes blazed again in the face of Dean’s aggression but his face contorted with unmistakable guilt and, voice lowered to little more than a husky whisper, he said, “It’s more a case of what I have done _with_ him. I believe Jimmy and I may have killed my father.”

Dean halted, utterly bewildered. “Huh?”

Castiel offered him a brief recap of the events that had occurred earlier. “And that’s how I ended up with my own ‘body’ finally. I believe Jimmy is safely back in your world now,” he ended weakly.

“So he could just log back in, right? In his _own_ avatar.”

“I am uncertain whether he could still successfully utilize a Gen 9 rig, even were one still available to him, since he no longer has a system interface attached to his avatar. It is possible he could return to Moondoor by utilizing a lesser rig. However, I believe he has other far more pressing personal issues to deal with at this time and he knows I am far more able to assist you than he is, since I am far stronger and no longer bound by the FP protocols.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since I now inhabit my own avatar, my actions are fully autonomous. I am now free to assist you, should I choose to do so, without being constrained by your varying levels of Righteousness. There is no requirement anymore for you to _pray_ for my assistance.”

Dean waved at him impatiently. “I don’t care about _that_,” he snarled. “I want to know what ‘pressing personal issues’ you’re talking about. You’re implying Jimmy is dealing with some kind of personal crisis. You think I’m going to just ignore that and carry on _playing_, instead of trying to help him?”

“There is no assistance either of us can provide,” Castiel informed him bluntly. “Without my presence in his body, his health will decline rapidly and I am not an ArchAngel. I do not have the ability to seed myself back inside him.”

“What the fuck you talking about? What’s wrong with his health?”

Castiel blinked slowly. He had told Dean that Jimmy had been ‘kidnapped’ by Chuck when he had attempted to log into the game, and what had happened subsequently, but not the circumstances which had led him to log in from a different tank in the first place. His _brief_ recap had apparently lacked a number of essential details. However, “ I am not certain that Jimmy’s truth is my tale to tell,” he said, cautiously.

“Fuck that,” Dean spat. “Jimmy made me a promise, a _solemn_ promise, to tell me _everything_ when he logged in today and, if what you say is true, he sent _you_ specifically to me when he realized he was going to be unable to get here himself. That definitely implies he wants you to tell me everything, bud, so start talking.”

Castiel cocked his head in a distinctly Jimmy-like mannerism, and blinked slowly as he considered Dean’s words. Eventually, with a sigh of defeat he nodded. “I believe you may be correct. The situation is particularly germane given that you need to understand the particular value to humanity of this world’s virtual intelligences. However, I hesitated to impress that particular fact upon you in view of my father’s machinations. I find myself in somewhat of a quandary now that I no longer trust the original orders I was previously following.”

“Is Chuck really dead?” Dean blurted suddenly. “Shouldn’t that have had some dramatic effect on Moondoor itself?”

“No…yes… and no,” Castiel replied thoughtfully, though not particularly helpfully.

“Which?” Dean demanded.

“The answer is complex,” Castiel replied. “Chuck himself survived, to a certain degree, since one of his aspects has survived. It has however become disassociated from what you would consider the ‘game engine’ that powers this world. Certain autonomous sub-routines that once formed part of my father also remain active and functioning within necessary parameters, thus ensuring Moondoor’s basic operation. However those… amputated… parts cannot be reattached to what remains of my father and, furthermore, cannot sustain this world indefinitely. They are inadequate as a long-term solution. Neither they, nor Chuck, can acquire the necessary power to evolve or respond to change now that the central core processor that formerly encompassed the majority of my father’s power has been deleted.”

Dean considered this, frowning with concentration, as he tried to wrap his brain around such an alien concept. Eventually he said, “So basically, Chuck’s memories and personality survived but he’s just a ‘guy’ now, rather than a ‘god’, and the part of him that has been left to run Moondoor is just a kind of backup generator that’s eventually going to run out of juice?”

“Essentially,” Castiel agreed. “I imagine, should the present crisis be averted, the long term survival of Moondoor will require the insertion of a substitute A.I.”

“Assuming the ultimate survival of Moondoor is an important consideration at all,” Dean pointed out dryly.

“Which, is where the situation of Jimmy becomes particularly relevant,” Castiel said, and finally explained about the clinic and his own role in Jimmy’s recovery.

Dean listened quietly to the explanation, speaking only when Castiel finally reached the part where he’d been flung out of Jimmy’s original avatar and into the doppelgänger avatar.

“And now his cancer is going to come back?”

“Strictly speaking, it was no longer cancer even when I first was seeded into him. It is the mutated T-cells of his ‘cure’ that are now doing the damage to his body,” Castiel corrected.

Dean waved at him impatiently. “Whatever the fuck you want to call it, the point is that it’s going to kill him now because you didn’t get the damn job finished?”

“I believe the T-cells will return with increased aggression now I am no longer in place, “ Castiel agreed. “It is highly probable that they will act even more quickly now since I have inadvertently provided them with an environment more conducive to their assault.”

“You mean by destroying the other cells you’ve created an open playing field. He’s more vulnerable now than when you first entered him,” Dean accused.

“It is possible, considering his already compromised immune system, that you are correct. However, it is also unlikely. It was originally improbable that he would survive more than another four or five weeks,” Castiel replied. “Even despite the aggression with which I expect his Illness to return, I believe the impact of the improved overall health I have already provided will allow him to survive several weeks longer than his original prognosis.”

“So he gets another month or so? And that’s supposed to make things better?” Dean demanded angrily.

“The relevant information here, the fact that he was determined to share with you, is that I, like my brethren, have the ability to mend or heal the majority of human illnesses or injuries. Assuming, of course, that we are allowed the time to do so.”

“What kind of injuries?”

“We cannot regrow severed appendages,” Castiel admitted. “Though now I understand more about stem cells, I believe even that might be possible were I more powerful. The opportunity to experiment and evolve our abilities have been somewhat limited by the particular circumstances of our existence.”

“Because you have a limited supply of potential hosts?”

“Indeed,” Castiel agreed. “The natural odds of one of the few people utilizing a suitable immersion tank being one of the people who require angelic healing are low.”

“Except for the meddling of Chuck, Cain and The Reaper,” Dean pointed out. “And they’re a bunch of self-serving assholes who use this shit for blackmail.”

Castiel sniffed haughtily, his expression cold. “This is not ‘shit’,” he bit tightly. “The healing is real and truly beneficial to the host. The motivations of those such as my father does not detract from what Jimmy considered a ‘miracle’.”

“Yeah?” Dean challenged, his cheeks flushed with fury. “Shame his miracle worker turned out to be an Indian Giver then, isn’t it? You can’t do shit like that, man. You can’t promise someone a cure, then snatch it out of their hands again. That’s a fucking asshole move. That’s fucking _cruel_. You gave Jimmy hope, didn’t you? And then you took it away.”

“It was not my choice,” Castiel protested. “The only alternative scenario would have been to allow _him_ to be placed within this avatar and he would then have been trapped in ‘heaven’ as a level 1 NPC character with no ability to ever escape.”

“You could have stayed inside his body, healing it, then come back for him,” Dean argued.

“Even if that were possible, there would have been no way for us to transfer our consciousness on my return,” Castiel retorted. “It would take someone at least as powerful as an Archangel to even attempt it. Besides, it was not my choice to make. I did not have the right to insist upon being the one to remain in Jimmy’s fleshly body. Were I to do so, I would be no better than the body-stealing monster he originally perceived me to be. I did not have the right to make that decision for him.”

As furious as Dean was, he couldn’t fault Castiel’s logic. Forcefully taking sole occupancy of Jimmy’s body, even with the excuse of it being ‘in his best interests’, would have been the biggest asshole move of all.

“Jimmy could not bear the idea of living an indefinite life in an artificial personal ‘heaven’. He perceived the idea as being something horrific, despite Charles Shurley appearing to be apparently fully content with the situation,” Castiel explained. “I believe my father assumed Jimmy’s reaction would be favourable based on an insufficient data set. Charles Shurley was apparently suicidally unhappy in his previous existence and the other inhabitants of Chuck’s heavens had no physical bodies to return to. Consequently using _their_ acceptance of artificial ‘heavens’ as a viable option was fallacious data upon which to predict the reaction of someone like Jimmy who has both spent his whole life fighting to survive and yet also accepting the inevitability of his death. I do not believe Jimmy would ever find any comfort in my father’s third option of a form of digital immortality.”

Dean shuddered. “Nah, I’m with him on that,” he agreed. “I get it. That ain’t heaven. That’s fake shit. A permanent gilded cage.”

Castiel raised a brow curiously at Dean’s reaction. “You too would find the scenario unacceptable?”

“Definitely,” Dean agreed fervently.

Castiel shrugged. “Perhaps you would feel differently were you faced with the situation yourself. I do not believe it is possible to fully predict your behaviour in such a situation unless you have experienced it yourself.”

“Stuff your condescending bullshit where the sun don’t shine,” Dean snarled. “You think I don’t face the exact same situation every fucking time I log in and out of this game? Can you even begin to imagine the amount of mind-fuckery I go through every time I take a step in this world, knowing I’ll log out and get stuck back in my own useless fucking body again? Don’t you think, every day, it doesn’t occur to me to maybe just _stay_ here forever?”

Castiel blinked slowly several times. “I do not understand,” he admitted.

Dean glared at him furiously, then frowned and choked a bitter laugh. “Of course. You don’t know. Why _would_ you know? Looks like we’re both Chuck’s patsies playing with half a deck with no fucking idea what’s really going on.”

“What is it that I do not know?” Castiel demanded.

“I’m a paraplegic,” Dean spat. “My spinal cord was completely severed at TH9, ten years ago. I have no feeling below my waist. It’s not just my legs that are fucked. I can’t even take a piss without… fuck why am I trying to explain this shit to you? Just take it I know _exactly_ how attractive an offer like Chuck’s offer of a permanent fake heaven would have been.”

Castiel flinched as though Dean had struck him. “What have I done?” he moaned, his eyes darting furtively as though he wished nothing more than to find a way to escape the conversation. “In assisting Jimmy, I have become the author of your destruction.”

“Come again?” Dean asked, frowning in complete confusion. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“My father intended to occupy your avatar to defeat Cain,” Castiel explained.

“Yup, by tricking me into thinking I was spreading my legs for _you,” _Dean agreed easily. “And? So? Not seeing the bad side of you stopping that happening.”

“An injury such as yours, whilst probably beyond any Angel’s abilities to heal, would have been no issue whatsoever for someone as powerful as my father,” Castiel admitted reluctantly. “In destroying his central processor, I have removed that possibility.”

“Woah,” Dean breathed.

“I apologize.”

“Don’t,” Dean snapped. “Like you said, it was only a ‘possibility’. And a fucking highly unlikely one at that. If Chuck’s actual intention had ever been to heal my real body for _my _benefit, why the fuck did he do all the subterfuge to try and get inside me, huh? Why didn’t he just come offer me a straightforward deal in exchange for my co-operation?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel admitted. “It would have been a more logical approach.”

Dean smiled wryly. “Because I would have told him to take his offer, stick it up his ass and swivel on it,” he said. “You know what ten years of living as a paraplegic does? It makes you turn into Gollum. You hoard and jealously guard every fraction of autonomy you can grab onto and you sit there and rubs your hands over it like some cartoon villain. And even the suggestion of handing over that hard won independence to someone else makes you want to chuck your cookies. If the fucking devil himself came knocking on my door offering me a ‘miracle cure’ in return for me giving up even a jot of my free will, I would have slammed the door in his face. So it wasn’t a possibility. Somehow or other, Chuck understood that about me. Seems his time living as Charles Shurley wasn’t a total waste.”

“I don’t believe so,” Castiel pondered. “Even at the end, when Jimmy defeated him, my father had no true understanding of human psychology or he would have identified the trap that had been lain for him. I believe the only being of my kind who has any true understanding of human frailties and strengths is my uncle. I believe he must have influenced the direction my father took to approach you. If what you are saying is true, then the only situation in which you might conceivably agreed to host an Angel _is_ the subterfuge my father devised. However, I truly doubt he was capable of making that character assessment of you without considerable assistance. The only digital being with that level of human understanding is most likely my uncle, the being known to you as The Reaper.”

“The same asshole that ‘helped’ Jimmy fall into Chuck’s trap?”

“But also ensured he did so with a way to not only escape it but destroy the majority of my father’s power in the process,” Castiel pointed out.

“So the real ringmaster here _is_ The Reaper. The same ‘guy’ who pulled Sam into this shitstorm.”

“Again, your judgement of the matter is based on selective information,” Castiel argued. “Surely it is Cain who is ultimately responsible for your brother’s inclusion in this ‘shit storm’. My uncle merely changed the timeframe of his predicted response to information which would have been provided to him with or without the Reaper’s interference.”

“Smoke and mirrors, man,” Dean scoffed. “And that finger thing you do when you quote stuff is really dorkish, okay, so stop it.”

Castiel frowned. “I have frequently witnessed Jimmy utilizing the same affectation. You have never criticised him for such actions. It is an efficient way to clarify when spoken words are from a different original source.”

“Context is usually sufficient clarification. And I don’t criticise Jimmy because it’s kinda cute when _he_ does dork stuff. Because he _is_ a dork. You, on the other hand, are just a creepy-ass body-snatching hunk of computer code.”

“Hey,” Loki complained. “How many times do I have to tell you to lay off the xenophobic bullshit?”

“_About time you made an appearance,” _Dean snarked. “_How much of this shit is true?”_

_“_Don’t ask me. This is the first I’ve heard of any of it. Excuse me if I’m still busy absorbing the fact that my own father was planning to rip me out of your head and throw me away like a used condom.”

“_Oh shit. Sorry. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of his plan. I guess the only way he could have gotten inside me is if you did an Elvis. But, hang on, that means none of this would have worked anyway. In the highly unlikely event of me letting Castiel into my head, I definitely never would have asked you to fall on your sword to let Castiel take your place, so Chuck’s substitution plot was doomed anyway.”_

_“_Since the only likely scenario would have involved you facing certain death without accepting ‘Castiel’s’ assistance, my own death would have been inevitable anyway,” Loki pointed out. “Under the circumstances, me ‘leaving the building’ to ensure at least one of us survived would have been a logical choice.”

“What the fuck is it about you self-sacrificing assholes?” Dean snarled out loud. “How the hell am I supposed to keep fighting for your right to survive when all you guys seem to do is throw yourselves off cliffs like lemmings, huh? It kinda negates the argument you’re as important as humans if you keep treating yourselves as disposable whenever a human life is under threat.”

“Really?” Castiel countered. “Isn’t a person’s capacity for self-sacrifice on behalf of others considered a mark of true ‘humanity’?”

“Jesus, just stop it, okay? You guys are giving me a headache,” Dean grumbled. “I don’t know what to think anymore. It looks like the only reason I’m a Knight at all is that Chuck wanted to get me inside the game so he could manoeuvre me into a position where he could take me over, then he was going to do an Elvis himself. He was going to ride my avatar right out of here, presumably kicking me into touch completely, so he could take over RRE in my world. And what’s with that shit, anyway? Why would a ‘God’ of a virtual world want to give that shit up to become a damned human CEO in my world. Is that seriously supposed to be an upgrade? Why the fuck would he throw away his flowy robe shit for a three-piece suit?”

“Except for your extreme profanity, I share your sentiments,” Castiel admitted. “I can only suggest that my father decided the world was not enough.”

“Did you seriously just reference James Bond?” Dean asked incredulously.

“I have access to many of James Novak’s memories,” Castiel admitted.

‘Gotcha,’ Dean thought. Now he had an actual _name_ for Jimmy it wouldn’t take Ash long to track him down. All he said though was, “I honestly can’t imagine Jimmy choosing to watch James Bond.”

“It was, I believe, the best of a poor choice on a commercial air flight he took several years ago,” Castiel explained. “However, the analogy is appropriate. I believe my father’s experience of living as Charles Shurley convinced him that the only way to truly win the ‘game’ was to cast his net wider. He presumably realised Moondoor was not _the _world, but merely _a_ world. To _win_, it would be necessary to take control of _all_ worlds.”

“I don’t think even being a rich-as-fuck CEO of one of the top 100 companies is going to count as ‘world domination’,” Dean pointed out. “It’s not like that kind of shit would ever get you into a position of power. Can’t see anyone ever voting a _businessman_ to become President,” he scoffed.

“Admittedly that scenario is improbable,” Castiel agreed. “However, I was referencing Oz.”

“Charlie told me Oz wasn’t that impressive. Well, ‘cept for the flying monkeys. She liked _them _apparently.”

“My understanding is that RRE now has the capacity to create any number of new digital worlds, Oz only being the first, utilising the latest of technological advances. Their operational effectiveness is limited only by RRE’s inability to recreate A.I.’s such as Chuck, Amara and The Reaper. It seems a logical deduction that my father aspired to have control of _all_ of those new worlds by controlling RRE.”

“So, basically, he was bored of Moondoor and was going to just fuck off out of here and leave it to burn, huh?”

“He certainly implied his original intention had been to remove all aspects of his presence from this world. He did not intend to leave even the rudimentary maintenance protocols in place,” Castiel admitted bitterly.

“Jeez,” Dean breathed as he absorbed the implications of the V.I.’s words. “He was gonna hot-tail outta here and leave all his kids to die? Fucker. I’m sorry man. That sucks. Sorry to say this, bud, but your ‘dad’ is an asshole.”

“So it appears,” Castiel agreed grimly.

“And that’s why you offed him, huh? To save your..um..brethren? I mean, I respect that and not only because of the healy thing although, yeah, I can see that’s pretty huge too. I see why Jimmy waited for actual proof before throwing that responsibility onto my head too. Fuck.”

“The occupants of the virtual heavens were also a consideration. Despite both you and Jimmy expressing anathema for the idea of digital existence, Charles Shurley was proof that not all humans share your sentiments. It is logical, therefore, to assume that other human souls in that situation may share _his_ sentiments. They should, at least, be offered the option to remain within their personal heavens.”

“How many Charles Shurleys are there? I thought you said Chuck only had one ‘aspect’ living in my world.”

“My understanding is that the other occupants are all the people whose fleshly bodies have expired whilst their consciousness was situated within their Avatars in Moondoor. I do not believe that situation encompasses more than a few dozen people in total, even allowing for the most recent destruction wrought by Amara. However, each and every one of them is a ‘person’ whose existence has worth.”

“ALL the people?” Dean demanded urgently. “Including the original Knights of Hell?”

“My father specifically referenced their inclusion in the residents of his heavens,” Castiel agreed implacably.

“You’re telling me my mother is still alive?”

“After a fashion,” Castiel agreed. “Though that concept would depend upon your definition of life, would it not? If you accept that I, and Loki, and my other brethren are ‘alive’, then, yes, your mother is also alive.”

“You fucker. Don’t you think you should have, maybe, started this fucking conversation with that little factoid?” Dean spat.

Castiel appeared to consider that seriously before shaking his head in negation. “I believe adding that information prematurely would have been perceived as ‘blackmail’ also. The knowledge only adds to your burdens, does it not?”

“My mom’s alive,” Dean breathed, gesturing impatiently at Castiel to negate any suggestion that could possibly be a ‘burden’. “Can I meet her? Can I go see her in her ‘heaven’?”

Castiel cocked his head thoughtfully. “I believe it would be possible. The ‘heavens’ are not situated in a different realm of existence. They are simply located in a remote geographical location. It should be possible for you to port there, though you may need my assistance to physically locate and enter her specific ‘heaven’.”

“Then let’s go,” Dean demanded urgently.

“I believe arriving during daylight would be more appropriate,” Castiel pointed out. “I understand nocturnal visitations are often unwelcome.”

Dean thought about that, then nodded his reluctant acceptance. From what he remembered of his mother, he imagined she’d respond to a couple of strangers turning up at her doorstep in the middle of the night with a shoot first, ask questions later reaction.

“Tomorrow morning then,” he said firmly. “I’ll meet you here first thing and we’ll go, yeah?”

“I will be here when you log in,” Castiel agreed. Then he shrugged, looking oddly human and vulnerable for a moment. “I have no where else to go. I will simply wait here for your return.” He leaned back against the wall of the Roadhouse, in clear indication he was intending to stand there all night until Dean returned.

Dean fought the urge to physically slap his own head as he belatedly realised that Castiel wouldn’t be ‘logging-out’. This _was_ Castiel’s body now. He had nowhere to log out _to_. He rifled through his inventory, searching for the gold Ash had gifted him with on his exit from Purgatory. “Okay, bud, this is what we’re going to do. We go find Ellen and get you booked into a room here. I’ve got enough gold to book you a few days bed and board for now, then we’ll hit up Ash for more gold ‘cos he’s rich as fuck in Moondoor rss. “

“I don’t understand,” Castiel confessed.

“You feeling tired? Hungry?”

“This body is experiencing those discomforts,” Castiel admitted. “I am accustomed to ignoring such trivialities.”

“Yeah, yeah, ‘course you are. That’s cos Jimmy looked after all that shit, right? Well, news-flash, bud, this body is _yours_ so from now on you need to deal with the small stuff too, okay?”

It felt weird to see Castiel looking less like a bad-ass angel and more like a confused child as he responded to Dean’s words with visible dismay. It also made Dean feel better. So sue him, he kinda liked getting the opportunity to play ‘big brother’ again.

“Come with me, and we’ll get you squared away with Ellen. We need her help to get you accepted into the Hunter guild too. I can’t share rss and shit with you unless we’re Guildmates and you’re gonna need a couple of ports to go with me tomorrow. Thank god Jimmy gave me a pile of them before he logged out yesterday.”

“I could fly there. That’s how I returned here tonight. It’s only approximately 3000 miles.”

“How fucking fast do you fly?” Dean asked. “ No, don’t even answer that. It’s no wonder you’re tired and hungry, you idiot. No. I don’t want to hear it,” he added, as Castiel opened his mouth to speak. “Just get your ass inside.”

Peculiarly, Ellen didn’t seem to be surprised either by his return or by his companion. She accepted ‘Jimiel’s’ change of identity, appearance and player level without comment. 

“This is all I’ve got on me,” Dean said, handing over all of his gold. “But let him have whatever he needs and Ash will sort you out.”

“I think gold is the least of my worries these days,” Ellen replied dryly. “Castiel’s welcome to stay here. You are too, should the need arise. Though, between you and me, Dean, I would probably suggest you get the hell out of dodge whilst the going’s good. Things are changing around here. Big things. If I had your opportunity to just walk away from this mess, I ‘d be gone so fast I wouldn’t even leave a memory behind.”

“You know something,” Dean replied. “I don’t believe you. You’re no more the kind of person to cut and run than I am.”

Hands on her hips, she regarded him with a wry smile. “Maybe so,” she admitted. “But it would be nice to think _one_ of us had a sense of self-preservation.” She sighed then and shrugged. “Sit down and have a drink and something to eat whilst Jo gets Castiel’s room ready.”

“She is probably right, you know,” Castiel said, when Ellen had moved away to the bar. “Now that my father has left Moondoor, it is likely that Cain will enter Sam’s avatar no later than tomorrow. As soon as he does so, Richard Roman’s fleshly body will register as deceased. Regardless of what then happens in Moondoor, you and Sam could take advantage of the inevitable confusion at RRE to stake your claim on the company. I understand that the process would take time but within a few weeks at most, I am sure it would be safe for you to assume ownership. The staff currently loyal to Roman will surely not remain so after his official death.”

“Why are you saying this to me? Do you honestly think I’d just walk away and let people die here when I have the chance to stop it?” Dean protested.

“I _honestly_ doubt that you do have a realistic chance now,” Castiel replied bluntly. “Unless you immediately commit yourself to actively seeking and destroying your fellow knights, even knowing that doing so may cause their real life deaths also, then Cain will rapidly become too strong for you to possibly defeat because I assure you that _he_ will not hesitate to do what must be done. If you even allow him to reach rank four, your own defeat is probably inevitable because his presence will automatically add 190 levels to whatever rank he achieves. You, on the other hand, will individually never have more than the total of the ranks you gain yourself.”

“I get that,” Dean said thoughtfully . “According to the numbers you and Jimmy came up with, at rank four Cain would only be ten levels weaker than me at rank six.”

“Precisely,” Castiel agreed. “Because by removing Chuck from the picture, you remain unseeded and that means your only real chance of winning a one on one battle with Cain is if you reach rank 7. Forgive me for saying this, but realistically the odds of you locating and killing six other knights faster than Cain can find and kill three is improbable at best.”

“You think I’m going to fail.”

“Through no fault of your own, yes I do,” Castiel admitted.

“Then why are you even sitting here with me now? If you think the situation is hopeless, why bother with me at all?”

“If you are committed to this path I will endeavour to assist you. Perhaps the addition of my 191 levels of power can still make a difference in a final confrontation if we form a rally to overcome him. Perhaps we can also include the addition of Ashriel’s power to such a scenario.”

“You’re suggesting we throw out the idea of one-on-one out of the window entirely and set a war party on his ass instead?” Dean asked incredulously.

“I realise such a scenario is not considered ‘fair-play’ by human players of this ‘game’. However, this is not a _game_. Therefore arbitrary rules of good sportsmanship seem irrelevant in this situation. Furthermore, Cain’s own actions thus far have been contrary to any evidence that he ascribes to any sense of fair play himself.”

“Good point,” Dean agreed, as he considered Castiel’s suggestion. “Not sure the idea fits in with the whole Righteous Man scenario though. Doesn’t feel very righteous to set a wolf pack against a single opponent, regardless of how strong that opponent is.”

“I disagree,” Castiel replied. “The definition of ‘Righteousness’ is acting in a way that is morally right or justifiable. The methodology of your actions is less crucial than the morality those actions uphold. If a team of players are required to achieve the desired, morally correct, outcome then using a team is justifiable. It may even be preferable.”

“Why preferable?”

“You humans have a saying that power corrupts. Certainly, in giving too much power to Cain he became corrupted. I believe the same may be said of my father. The originally conceived idea to use a single individual to defeat a God appears to be intrinsically flawed because it simply creates a _new_ god. “

“You think if I managed to win this thing alone I would become another Cain?”

Castiel shrugged. “I would prefer not to find out.”

Dean glowered. “ I want to be pissed at you for saying that. But I kinda get where you’re coming from. I mean I want to punch you in the face for even suggesting I’d do that kind of shit but who the hell knows? I mean, I’d never deliberately misuse the power but it’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? I mean I’d feel obliged to use the power to do good, because having power creates its own responsibility but who the fuck am I to decide what the right thing to do is? So I could do something for the right reasons but still fuck it up completely because I wouldn’t realise the full consequences of my actions until it was too late. And, who knows, maybe I’d start thinking might is right, or some such shit, and end up being even worse than Cain.”

Castiel’s eyes glowed softly and his lips twitched into an almost smile. “It is your self-doubt that reassures me of your righteousness. You would be within your rights to curse me for expressing reservations over this matter. Instead, you willingly share my concern. It is why I wish to join your ‘team’.”

“But assuming that Team takes out Cain, I’d still need to be the one to strike the actual killing blow in order to absorb Cain’s levels, so I could then take on Amara, and that would give me the power anyway. So how would that be any improvement?”

“I believe there would be a vast attitudinal difference between someone gaining that power alone and gaining it via teamwork,” Castiel suggested. “Perhaps a suitable analogy would be to compare the power of a democratically elected leader with a despot. Both may hold similar power but one holds the power in trust whilst the other wields it alone.”

“You’re saying you, Ash and Charlie would kick my ass if I got too big for my britches?” Dean laughed.

“I believe you would kick your own ‘ass’, were you to feel you betrayed our trust in any way.”

Dean licked his lips, pondering quietly, then nodded. “How the fuck do you know me better than I know myself?”

“I am drawing both on Jimmy’s perceptions of you and my own observations. Residing inside Jimmy, I had little to do this past week except to observe you,” Castiel pointed out.

“Which makes you sound a bit creepy ass stalker, ya know?” Dean replied, with a smirk.

“Does it?” Castiel replied dryly.

“You’re still a dick, aren’t you?” Dean accused, though his tone was almost fond. “So running the numbers again, working on the basis we can combine our levels with those of Charlie and Ash, I still need a minimum of boss rank five to be in with a fighting chance, huh?”

“Yes, but you defeating four Knights is far more probable than six.”

“Granted,” Dean agreed. “So still not easy but doable. Problem though. Assuming we manage this, I’m still going to be only level 1000 when I take on Amara.”

“I am no longer positive that Amara’s defeat is necessarily the required endgame of this scenario. I cannot conceive of why my uncle would have been so precise in ensuring my father was reduced in power rather than destroyed unless he feels some manner of affection for his sibling. It follows, therefore, that he would not wish my aunt’s complete destruction either.”

“That kinda makes sense,” Dean agreed. “The Reaper clipped Chuck’s wings but didn’t kill him. It would make sense for him to do the same with Amara. So for all we know he’s already got some plan in place for dealing with _her. _ Who knows, though? Shame none of this came with an instruction manual. The problem is I’m getting information piecemeal. I don’t know _everything.”_

_“_Nobody is omniscient, Dean. Not even my father could have made that claim.”

“Are you sure you aren’t Jimmy?” Dean huffed. “Cos that’s the kind of pedantic shit he always says. The _point_ I’m making is that everyone holds pieces of the puzzle and they all tell me what they think I need to hear but not, necessarily what I _do_ need to hear. It’s when I put seemingly unrelated facts together that I realise I know more than I think I know but still less than I need to know.”

“I do not understand.”

“Okay, here’s an example. You told me what you and Jimmy figured out about the numbers… about how Roman was almost as strong as Amara when they fought. And you’re right. But, you’re also kinda wrong.”

“I am wrong?” Castiel demanded, his tone both skeptical and offended.

“Because you don’t know what Charlie told me. There’s a piece of information Sam found out from your ‘uncle’. The V.I. sitting inside Sam’s avatar as a place holder for Cain is named Ramiel. And Anael, who he met living in Anna’s body, said Ramiel was one of the original V.I.’s. He fled his host before they were killed by Roman. That’s how he survived.”

“Although that is interesting and probably explains why he is so willing to assist Cain at this juncture given the longevity of their relationship, I fail to understand the significance regarding the numbers.”

“Well, there isn’t one. But that’s my point,” Dean exclaimed.

“Are all humans as frustrating as you or am I merely fortunate to have encountered an anomaly?” Castiel sniped.

“See,” Dean crowed. “Snide and sarcastic. It’s almost like you’re becoming a real boy.”

Castiel visibly took a deep breath before saying, “pray tell me what your point is.” He may _also_ have muttered ‘if you have one’ under his breath but Dean couldn’t have sworn to it.

“My point is why don’t the seeded angels make any difference to the levels gained when a Knight kills another Knight? I mean it makes sense _now_ given that none of the S.I.’s have ‘merged’ the way they did originally, but surely it should have made a difference back then. Roman didn’t just kill his colleagues, he also killed their ‘angels’, so why didn’t that make him stronger? Okay,” he added, when Castiel still appeared to miss his point, “you’re level 191. If I kill you, will I gain XP for killing a level one NPC or the level 191 character you’ve become by merging?”

“Why would you wish to kill me?”

“I don’t. I’m just using killing you as an example.”

“I find it a distasteful example. A hypothetical killing would be a preferable example. Particularly since it would require a hypothetical example to be plausible since it is highly unlikely you would manage to defeat a level 191 character in any real scenario.”

“Nope, you’re definitely _not_ Jimmy. He’d never be such a dick,” Dean snapped. “Just answer the goddamned question.”

“I fully believe you would gain XP for the equivalence of killing any other level 191,” Castiel admitted. “Not that there _is any_ other level 191 since I am currently the only one in existence. I am most likely to be the most powerful being currently existing within Moondoor. I fully expect that to be a temporary situation, however, since Cain will absorb a minimum of 15 extra levels when he joins with Nick tomorrow. Perhaps more, if Nick has achieved level 50 already.”

“Okay, so _not _the point. What I’m saying is that although I don’t know the going XP rate for ganking a level 191, so I can’t offer any specific numbers, Richard Roman killed 8 knights and _also_ 7 angels, right? So he had 290 levels for himself combined with Cain, plus eight hundred from the other knights, okay? So even if we accept he didn’t win the actual _levels_ of the other angels, surely he must have gained _some_ significant extra power from killing them anyway. According to your numbers, he was forty levels higher than Amara and that might not _look _significantly higher than 1050, in true terms it really is. So in my book that should have been enough to kick her ass anyway. But add whatever he got for killing the angels to his 1090, he should have been able to do it with his hands tied behind his back.”

“I believe that would have been highly counterproductive,” Castiel answered.

Dean rolled his eyes impatiently. “It’s figurative. But if you want to be anal, just deal with the figures.”

“I do not see any fault with your reasoning. I concur. Logically, Richard Roman _must _have been considerably higher than 1090. There is only one possible explanation,” Castiel concluded. “Richard Roman did not _fail_ to kill Amara. He _chose _not to.”

“Yup, and that makes no sense to me. It would have made sense if he had precognition. Or, at least, if _Cain_ did, since she’s sure as hell proving useful to him now. But fifteen years ago, when Amara was thrown into a prison instead of killed, none of today’s events were predictable. Roman didn’t even know my mother was dead. So what was his reasoning?”

“Hubris, perhaps,” Castiel offered. “It seems reasonable to assume that the reason Roman preserved Amara is that he could not accept his own creation was irredeemably flawed. Perhaps his intention was to return to your world and then reprogram her to act in a more acceptable manner. Or, perhaps, remove her from Moondoor entirely and place her in a stand-alone server, as he did with my uncle, so that she would no longer be a danger to others.”

Dean blinked slowly as he absorbed this. “What if…. nah… who knows what the fucker is really up to… but maybe… huh… goddamnit… what if that’s right?”

“Are you feeling the adverse effects of your alcoholic beverage?” Castiel inquired politely. “Your ability to communicate effectively appears compromised.”

“I’m not compromised… you’re compromised,” Dean spluttered, then flushed when Castiel responded to the childish insult by regarding him as though he was a particularly interesting bug. “I’m not _drunk_,” he clarified. “I just had a particularly shocking realization. I think… maybe… that’s kinda what the Reaper is trying to do. Get both Chuck and Amara _out_ of Moondoor to somewhere they can’t do any more damage. Only, unlike Roman, he can’t either enter this world _or_ remove them himself. That’s why he needs people to do his dirty work for him.”

“You believe the Reaper _is_ ‘wearing a white hat’?” Castiel queried, with finger quotations.

“I told you not to do that. And, yeah, in his own fucked up way I kinda think he is,” Dean admitted. “It doesn’t mean I don’t still wanna kick his ass for the way he’s used Sam and Jimmy, but if I’m right I’m kinda onboard with what he’s trying to do.”

Castiel regarded him curiously. “You care only for the impact of this situation on your brother and Jimmy?”

Dean flushed hotly. “Nah, sorry man. Obviously I care about the rest of you too. It’s just that, naturally, I’m even _more p_issed about the effects on people I personally care about.”

“I see,” Castiel said thoughtfully. “I find that somewhat disturbing.”

Dean squirmed uncomfortably. “Look, Cas, I’m gonna fight just as hard for you and Loki and Ellen and Benny and even _Garth_. You _all_ matter to me now. And let’s not even mention my _mother.”_

_“_You misunderstand. I am referring to the fact that you have not once expressed any anger or dismay over your _own_inclusion within those who have been manipulated in this situation. Do you not feel any anger over the way _you_ have been used?”

Dean shrugged indifferently. “Well, yeah, sure, of course,” he said, “ but that’s hardly relevant is it?”

Castiel considered him quietly but didn’t reply.

Dean flushed slightly, feeling uncomfortable under the scrutiny. He rose to his feet. “I’m gonna log out now, see if I can find out what’s going on with Sam and Charlie, then I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning after I get some sleep. You going to be okay on your own, right?”

“I am, as you say, a ‘real boy’, now,” Castiel replied dryly. “ I am sure I can manage a few hours of solitude.”

Dean flushed again under the gentle mockery. “Okay,” he said, backing away from the table, unsure why it felt so awkward and, well, wrong to just walk away from the Angel wearing Jimmy’s face. Then he shook himself, remembering he needed to talk to Ash, get him searching for the real Jimmy and, with that, it felt easier to leave Castiel behind.

But maybe not as easy as it should have been.

Castiel stared after him as he left the Roadhouse, pondering the conversation and Dean’s surprising lack of self-concern,

“I think that boy is so used to taking responsibility for other people that he’s forgotten he matters too,” Ellen said, as she moved to join him. “You like him, don’t you?”

He responded with a quelling frown.

Which she simply rolled her eyes at. “Don’t you pull that ‘I’m a Seraph bullshit on me, boy. I already know you’re not the same kind of asshole as your brothers. You’re still prickly, but kind of soft around the edges at the same time. Admit it, you like Dean.”

“I find him completely aggravating on the whole,” Castiel replied shortly.

“And yet compelling too,” she suggested.

“I admit a certain ambivalence at times.”

“Perhaps because he also has some soft edges?” she suggested.

“He has too _many_ soft edges,” Castiel complained. “Too many chinks in his armor. His excessive concern for others creates vulnerabilities. A warrior needs to put the needs of the many over those of the few.”

“But he’s _not_ a warrior, is he? He’s simply a man. A good man. A _righteous _man.”

“Indeed,” Castiel scowled.

“And, Seraph or not, it strikes me that you are not exactly a ‘warrior’ yourself anymore, are you?”

“I am uncertain _what_ I am now. I stood against my own father. I fell from his grace. I am, if anything, perhaps only a traitor.”

“Save me from the self pitying mea culpa crap, Castiel. I don’t believe a word of it and neither, really do you. You don’t feel _guilty_ about what you did to Chuck. You feel guilty that you _don’t _feel guilty. I get it. Chuck was your ‘dad’. But Chuck was behaving like an asshole. You recognised it and stopped it. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Want to know what I think? You don’t regret what you did, you’re just floundering now because you exerted freewill for the first time in your life and now you don’t know who you are.”

“Possibly,” Castiel allowed.

“And Dean aggravates you because he is the living embodiment of ‘free will’. He both attracts and repels you because he is what you fear and yet what you want to be.”

“My ambivalence towards him is routed more deeply than that. I find I wish to convince him to stay because I truly believe he is the only person who might save us all. Yet I find myself also wishing to drive him away whilst he still has the chance to save himself. “

“And yet I note you have not warned him about the imminent reset?”

“I have not told him _yet,” Castiel _corrected. “Be assured I fully intend to do so.”

“So why the delay?”

“Why didn’t you tell him yourself ?” Castiel countered, his tone curious rather than accusing.

“Bobby made me swear that I wouldn’t get directly involved. I’m pretty sure no one has wrested the same promise from _you.”_

_“_I am unfamiliar with emotional attachments. I am however feeling quite…maudlin… about the situation with my father. I have a somewhat incomprehensible urge to allow Dean Winchester to achieve some ‘ closure’ with his mother before advising him of the inevitable consequence of my father’s ‘death’.”

Ellen thought about that, then shrugged her agreement. “You’ve got surprisingly good instincts. Most of your brothers are the same kind of self-serving assholes as your father. Looks like Jimmy’s been a good influence on you.”

Castiel considered that. “I believe my brethren would say Jimmy has ‘corrupted’ me. I, however, prefer your interpretation.”

Ellen nodded. “Just make sure Cinderella leaves the ball before the strike of midnight, okay?”

Castiel blinked his incomprehension.

“Get his ass out of Moondoor before the hard reset tomorrow night,” she clarified. “Make sure _he_ at least gets that one absolute _choice_ of whether or not to see this through to the end.”

“Of course,” Castiel agreed solemnly. “Ultimately, none of this matters unless he chooses to do this of his own free will.”

She clasped his shoulder briefly but fondly. “Keep the faith, Castiel. I trust Bobby. I don’t _understand _him, but I _trust_ him. For all the Reaper _believes_ he understands humans, I truly believe it is Bobby’s own wisdom that may ultimately prevail. And I _know_ he values that boy, Castiel. If Bobby believes he has what it takes, then I am willing to have faith in Dean too.”


	64. The Black Queen

Sam woke a little after seven and after, checking his new phone had charged, decided it wasn’t _too_ early to call Dean.

To be on the safe side, though, he started with just a text message to let Dean know his new number.

Within seconds his cell rang with a reply, as though Dean had been sleeping with his phone attached to his ear. More than likely, Sam decided, given his older brother’s mother hen tendencies.

Certainly, the first thing Dean did was harangue him for several minutes for his failure to contact him sooner.

It took over an hour to catch each other up with the latest happenings and if Sam had imagined the call might make either of them feel better, he was left sorely disabused of that notion. It seemed the more they uncovered, the less hopeful it appeared that a satisfactory resolution could be reached.

And Sam found himself in a complete quandary. 

Despite everything Dean had told him about this guy ‘Jimmy’ and the miraculous abilities of the V.I.s to cure human diseases, something he found surprisingly easy to accept considering his own relationship with Mortimer Blake, Sam still wasn’t convinced that the best solution wouldn’t simply be to turn Moondoor off completely.

Not that he had any current way to achieve that particular resolution in time anyway.

His instinct was, at the very least, to flood the internet with dire warnings for people to stay out of the game. Dean, however, said he had already had the same discussion with Ash and Ash’s considered opinion was that _any_ publicity was _good _publicity. Rather than scaring people away from the game the warnings would more likely drive people inside it to assuage their curiosity.

Sadly, Sam concurred. Whilst _some _people might be effectively scared off, far more thrill-seekers would be drawn like flies to honey to any whiff of scandalous danger.

And whilst Sam wanted to celebrate Dean’s apparent narrow escape from Chuck’s machinations, there was a part of him that couldn’t help wondering whether it would have been better to allow the situation to continue at least until Dean was ‘cured’ before taking a stand against the A.I.

If Jimmy had just played along a little longer, surely both he _and_ Dean would have been healed by the process of hosting Chuck.

“You’re such a lawyer,” Dean had told him, spitting the descriptor like a dirty word. “Always looking for the angle, the negotiation, the grey area to exploit. Well sometimes things are just black and white, Sam. Right or wrong. There ain’t no middle ground to squeeze benefit out of.”

And that had been to close an echo of Bobby Singer’s judgment for Sam’s comfort.

A little after eight-thirty, after eating a cobbled together breakfast from the supplies they found in Bobby’s kitchen and waiting with increasing impatience for the man himself to join them, Sam and Charlie decided the obvious place to find him was in the cavern beneath the house. So they descended the ladder from the basement room and, indeed, found Bobby sitting there seemingly in the middle of a one-sided argument with a player.

“What the hell did you think he was gonna say, ya idjit? Don’t ya reckon he’d already been screwed enough by your brother? ‘Course he was gonna tell ya to take a hike.”

Charlie exchanged a curious glance with Sam. None of the many screens on display indicated Bobby was using his speech to type software. Sam shrugged his own incomprehension.

“No. I don’t reckon he’ll change his mind. I wouldn’t… No. I don’t think he’s being unreasonable. You’re being unreasonable… Why, for once, can’t you just do something without expecting something in return?.. Why? …Why not?... No. .. That _isn’t _the ‘human’ way. Not _every _damn thing has to be a commercial transaction… Nope… Not listening to this crap any longer. Just think about what I said, Okay?”

He abruptly turned his attention to Sam and Charlie.

“There was a T.V. Show when I was a kid, “ he said, apropos of nothing. “Mr. Ed. I loved that show. Had a talkin’ horse. Used to think that would be real cool. Havin’ a talkin’ horse. Thing was Mr Ed, the horse, was smarter than the guy, Wilbur, who owned him. That was what made it funny. Damned horse was always the smartest guy in the room. Never really thought about that part. Just thought the idea of a horse, or maybe a dog even, being smart enough to talk would be a cool thing. Never really occurred to me that even if Mr. Ed was smarter than a human and talked like a human, that still didn’t actually make him human.”

Charlie thought she understood where Bobby was going with his monologue. “You don’t agree with the idea the A.I.s in Moondoor are ‘people’ with rights?”

Bobby blinked at her slowly. “Where the hell did you get a damned fool idea like that?”

Charlie flushed with embarrassment. “You were saying that Mr.Ed wasn’t human,” she prompted.

“Well, he wasn’t. And neither are the artificial intelligences Richard Roman created.”

“I’m confused,” she admitted. “What _is_ your point?”

“That when a critter speaks like a human, it’s easy to convince yourself they’re also gonna _think _like a human. Then they do something so blatantly non-human that you get rocked back on your heels and remember they are completely alien. It’s not about whether they are _people_ or whether they have _rights. _ It’s that they simply lack the same frames of reference as we do. It’s hard enough to grasp that concept when they look like a damn horse. Far harder when they look like a _human. _That’s my point, Charlie. They ain’t _human.”_

_“_You were talking to the Reaper, weren’t you?” Sam interrupted. “About James Novak.”

“Who the hell is James Novak?” Charlie asked.

“Some guy you and he have been playing with. Jimmy. Dean told me he was responsible for taking Chuck out. Though sounded more to me like the Reaper used him just as badly as Chuck did. Poor bastard’s got cancer in real life. Some V.I.called Casteel or something, was healing him for real. But now Jimmy’s been thrown out of the game completely, so Dean believes he’s going to die. He’s really torn up about it.”

“Jimmy’s going to die?” Charlie gasped, turning to Bobby in horror. “Can’t the Reaper heal him?”

Bobby sniffed but nodded. “You’d think so. But he’s fucked it up. Damned idjit. Sometimes the asshole can’t do right for doin’ wrong but does he listen? Nope, ‘cos he ain’t human. Everything he does is _logical,_ based on available data, but problem is he sometimes interprets that data in some weird, convoluted _alien_ way and tryin’ to convince him he’s gone messed up is like hittin’ my head against a brick wall.

“Chuck got Jimmy tied up in this whole mess. The Reaper used the kid to pull Chuck outta Moondoor yesterday. So I was arguing with him ‘bout Jimmy. The Reaper felt bad ‘bout the way the kid got screwed and tried to make things better. Instead, he kinda made them worse. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Not even sure the Reaper ‘felt’ bad. Probably more a case of him logically concluding the human response to the situation _should_ be him feeling bad ‘bout what happened. Problem is, since he’s only _playin’ _at being human, he responded to the situation in what he _believes_ is a human way. Only it ain’t. And now he’s all butt hurt ‘cos the kid told him to get stuffed.”

“Chuck is no longer in Moondoor at all?” Charlie demanded. “That’s not possible. Moondoor can’t function without an A.I. to drive its game engine.”

“Apparently he left the subroutines running the base protocols in situ. Nothin’ has been affected _yet.”_

_“_Because it was _Thursday _yesterday. But it’s _Friday_ today.”

“That’s kind of a thing, Charlie. Friday always comes after Thursday,” Sam interjected.

She impatiently waved him silent. “You don’t understand, Sam, because you’re not a game player. Know what happens every weekend without fail in a pay-to-play game environment? System events. Game challenges offering prizes to players. Specific, time-limited events that set goals for players, with prizes on offer to the victors. The winning of which usually requires players to spend real-life money on game packs. The Devs program those events and upload them into the game environment on a Friday night.

“The whole system undergoes a hard reset at midnight on a Friday, so that the new coding can be incorporated into the game arena. The reset only takes a minute or two. It might cause the odd glitch for any player who’s online at the time but generally, the process is pretty seamless.”

“So, um, why’s that a bad thing… because I can tell from your faces that it _is_ a bad thing.”

“The reset won’t just apply the intended event coding, it will incorporate _any_ major changes that have occurred since the last reset. Basically, Moondoor is going to become aware that Chuck has left.”

“What will that actually mean? Will the game stop working altogether or something?” Sam asked.

Charlie shook her head. “Nope. It would be better if it did. But I’m pretty sure we won’t be that lucky. The most probable outcome, given that the base protocols are still in place, is that Moondoor will overwrite Chuck’s long-standing game rules with those of the A.I. who _is_ still inside the game. The game engine will accept Amara as being the A.I. in charge from now on. Whether she _wants_ to be or not.”

“But she’s the one who’s been causing the safety protocols on the immersion tanks to fail, isn’t she?” Sam demanded.

“Amara’s coding has apparently already been responsible for several player deaths,” Bobby said. “Although none of those deaths have been officially recognized as game-related, I’ve been working with an FBI Agent named Victor Henriksen to collate data regarding those deaths in an attempt to bring external pressure on RRE to lock player accounts out of the game. Whilst the last thing I want to do is close Moondoor itself down, I sure as hell would have done everything in my power to keep players out of the game whilst this crap is going on. Unfortunately, Henriksen hasn’t managed to convince any of his colleagues to take him seriously yet and now it looks like we’re out of time and it couldn’t have happened on a worse day of the week. Goddamned weekends.”

“Weekends are when the ratio of online players is highest,” Charlie explained, when Sam appeared confused by the significance of Bobby’s words. “On a Saturday, the number of players is at least double that of a weekday. Sometimes as many as a couple of hundred thousand players are online at the same time at the weekend.”

“So you’re saying at least twice as many players will be at risk tomorrow?”

“Oh, I suspect it will be _way_ more serious than that,” Charlie whispered, her expression stricken. “The reason Amara’s coding sometimes kills players is, when faced with situations that threaten their avatar’s lives, some people can’t deal with the pain and terror of facing a virtual death. They experience real-life heart failure and Amara’s coding also affects the safety mechanisms of their tanks so they fail to operate correctly to alert the authorities they need medical assistance. Obviously, very few people have inherent health issues that would cause such an extreme response to such a situation so people aren’t just dropping like flies, which is why no one has really noticed yet.”

“So, as terrible as that sounds, we’re still talking about a tiny number of people at risk even if the player numbers double,” Sam said reasonably.

“‘Cept you ain’t a player, so you aren’t asking the most logical question in this scenario,” Bobby said gruffly. “Why ain’t they just logging outta the game ‘fore it gets to that point?”

Sam nodded. “Good question,” he agreed. “That would seem to be the most logical response of a player facing imminent game death.”

“Because _that_ is what Amara’s coding _really_ does,” Charlie said. “Unopposed, Amara’s code will prevent players from logging back out of the game altogether.”

“When they are in danger?”Sam asked.

“At all. Any player who logs into Moondoor after the Darkness takes over completely is going to be trapped inside the game until _Amara’s _coding is erased by another hard reset to new rules. Which means that now Chuck has gone, even if Amara leaves the game completely, her coding will remain in place until Moondoor accepts the existence of a new ‘God’,” Charlie explained. “Which is presumably why Cain is re-enacting the Knights of Hell scenario. The Moondoor game engine will not accept a character as being at God-level unless it holds god-level power.”

“Which happens to be player level 1000,” Bobby interrupted helpfully. “Which also, conveniently, is the player level of a rank 9 Knight of Hell Boss character with an embedded angel. Well, truth be told he’ll be level 1090 but that’s irrelevant. Point is, it was _never_ about defeating Amara herself. The moment Cain had her released into Moondoor, he set the stage for _this_ outcome. To become Moondoor’s ‘God’, he needs to reach rank 9. Something he can only do by defeating the other knights. To do that, he needs to ensure they _have _to fight him. Which means he has to be able to ensure they can’t simply log-out to escape him.”

Sam shook his head in denial. “The Reaper told me what Cain _wanted_ was to take me over to gain control of RRE. Why does he even care about Moondoor?”

“You’re confusing Cain’s motivations with Chuck’s,” Bobby said. “Though that’s hardly surprising since I did too ‘til I spoke to the Reaper this morning. Thing is, whilst on the surface it kinda looks like they both wanted the same thing, truth is they both wanted totally _different_ things. Chuck wanted to get out of Moondoor. Cain wants to get _in_. Seems like Cain hasn’t enjoyed living as Richard Roman. All Cain _really_ wants is to get back home. Thing is though, he ain’t no fool. He knows Moondoor’s ultimate survival depends upon RRE. Cain wants to spend eternity as Moondoor’s ‘God’ but he _also_ needs to ensure Moondoor survives. No point ruling a sandbox if someone can come along and just close it down. He’s an archangel. He may not be as powerful as Chuck was but he _does_ have four aspects. I reckon his plan is to stick one of them into you, Sam, to keep control of RRE here in this world whilst the rest and primary part of him becomes the new Chuck.”

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked, as Sam scrambled for his phone.

“Gotta warn Dean not to log back in,” he said. “Fucking goddamnit,” he swore, as his call went straight to voice mail. “I’m too late.” He tried Ash’s number and, again, went to voicemail. “I think they’re both already inside the game.”

“The reset won’t happen until midnight tonight,” Charlie assured him. “Dean never stays logged in for more than twelve hours at a stretch. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to warn both of them before it happens.”

“How long _can_ someone stay logged into the game without it automatically causing physical damage to their real bodies?” Sam asked.

“Well, that’s the problem,” Charlie said. “Someone like Dean, or the other Knights, could probably survive for weeks to be honest. The immersion tanks handle nutrition and bodily waste and such. Unless they actually _die_ in-game, the worst they are going to suffer is some muscle wastage. But _most_ players don’t use immersion tanks at all. Anyone using a standard VR rig, like Ash and me, will die of thirst within three days. And if anyone finds them before that and detaches them from their equipment, they _could_ be sustained by hospital life support but for how long? They’ll register as ‘brain dead’ to any medical test and there will be no way for their consciousness to return to their bodies, even if no one has switched the support off before Amara’s protocols get overwritten, because they won’t still be wearing their VR rig.”

“You’re telling me we’ve only got until Monday night to stop nearly a quarter of a million people dying? That’s insane. Quite apart from anything else, won’t that destroy RRE anyway? Why would Cain want to create a situation which would ruin the company that owns Moondoor?” Sam protested.

“I ‘spect Cain is pretty sure it ain’t gonna come to that. When the reset happens, the Knights extra lives will be erased since the 10 lives protocol was one of Chuck’s codes. They’ll go from having 10 lives to one,” Bobby said. “So they’re gonna be immediately, unexpectedly vulnerable. Cain has two huge advantages over the other eight _official_ knights. He knows what they look like _and_ he’ll know their last log-in locations. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t get a stack of ports added inside Nick’s inventory before he jumps inside him. It’s easy to get the devs to help you cheat when you own the company. Cain probably ain’t expecting his take over bid to take more than a couple of days max. I’d lay money the game is already programmed to have a new hard reset on Sunday night.”

“And he doesn’t know about Dean, right? So if Dean just stays out of it, let’s Cain do his thing and Cain manages to defeat Amara before midnight Sunday then _no-one _dies?” Sam asked.

“Well, the eight other knights do,” Charlie corrected. “But that would be all. Probably. And none of _those_ guys are much loss to either world.”

“Yup, you could look at it that way,” Bobby agreed. “Sacrifice the 8 to save the rest an’ hope like hell that Cain decides to rescind Amara’s coding. Makes sense he would. Maybe. Unless the reason he’s moved most of the finances of RRE into RRE Power is he don’t give a shit one way or another whether RRE collapses because the last thing Cain wants is human players in _his_ world anyway. You think any of the other V.I.s in Moondoor want humans there either? As far as the average resident of Moondoor is concerned, players are at best unwanted immigrants and at worse hostile invaders. Think about it. What do we players do? We log into their world, cause mayhem and destruction, kill with abandon and then fuck off back home again. Is it that far fetched to imagine most of the self-aware inhabitants don’t want us there any more?”

“So we’re back to three days to save everyone?”

“Sounds like it,” Charlie said. “Shit, that’s not enough time. Why the hell couldn’t this have happened on a goddamned Monday?”

“You think four days would have made that much of a difference?” Sam asked incredulously.

“Maybe not in Moondoor, but out here, yeah, definitely. I know the exact code that’s going to cause the logout problem. But I not only have to find a way to hack the RRE mainframe but write two completely separate overrides to stop the reset affecting those particular protocols. I need days to achieve that. Not hours. It’s impossible to do it before midnight tonight.”

“Maybe not,” Bobby said. “Thing is, like I said, the Reaper isn’t human. His ideas aren’t like ours. They have _layers. _So I have to ask myself why you two here, now, together. I’m pretty sure why _you’re _here, Sam, but why Celeste Middleton? Can’t _just _be the Amara thing. That’s too obvious.”

“What Amara thing?” Charlie demanded.

Bobby shrugged carelessly. “Well she’s gonna need to ride _someone_ outta there, ain’t she? Not many folks with the brain capacity to host a God, you know, even temporarily. But park that for now,” he said, as she spluttered incoherently, “there’s plenty of time for _that_, so why now and why with Sam?”

“Look, I know you think this is all the Reaper’s plan, or something, but there was no way in hell he knew Charlie would follow me down to Belize. Charlie didn’t even know about the bonds, let alone the rest of it.”

Bobby guffawed loudly, slapping his thigh as he rose to his feet. “Of course,” he said. “_That’s _the reason he sent you after the bonds. So Charlie could use them.”

“What the fuck?” Charlie demanded. “ Why the hell would I want to own RRE?”

Bobby frowned at her. “What the hell you talking about? Campbell Holdings owns RRE. All the paperwork Sam’s holding says so.”

“The paperwork that is completely worthless unless or until it’s safe to make a claim,” Sam spat.

“Oh, it ain’t _worthless_,” Bobby chuckled. “It’s _exactly_ what we need.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam said, beginning to wish he had the phrase pre-recorded so he could just play it on demand instead of uttering it over and over.

“Tell me, Charlie. Is the protocol that allows players to log out of the tanks the same one as for the standard rigs?” Bobby asked.

“No, that’s why I need to write _two _overrides. The metadata that interacts with immersion tanks is coded differently than the protocols affecting VR rigs.”

“So it would be theoretically possible to override just the rig protocols? Prevent VR rig players, at least, from getting trapped in the game?”

“Yeah, and since they’re the most vulnerable it would make sense to prioritize them over tank players,” she agreed. “But it would take the best part of a day to do just _that_ much even if I had immediate access. Problem is, it would take me at least a full day to break into the RRE servers before I could even start the attempt.”

Bobby looked smug. “Which is why those Bonds are going to be the dealbreakers,” he chuckled. “Thing is, I know _just_ the person who can get you almost immediate access into the RRE server. The tricky thing is she works for the FBI and she ain’t gonna let just _anyone_ tinker around in a private company’s server, no matter the stakes. But since we can provide firm bona fides that Sam owns RRE, she ain’t gonna be breaking the law by letting you access his property.”

“Seriously? Who the hell is she?” Charlie demanded.

“Her name’s Penelope Garcia. But you probably know her as ‘The Black Queen’,” Bobby said, with a sly grin.

“Fuck, NO,” Charlie spat. “That bitch _hates _me. We’ve spent the last five years or so trading insults online. Why the hell do you imagine she’d do me any kind of favor now?”

“Possibly because her boss, a guy named Aaron Hotchner, is the Guildmaster of The Gods of War,” Bobby explained. “I kinda think Penelope might prefer he don’t log in tomorrow and get stuck inside the game forever. He’s a bit of an unimaginative asshole, to be honest, who’s refusing to even take Henriksen’s calls at the minute, but I gather he’s generally good at his job. I think she’ll consider saving his life worth calling a truce on your personal feud.”

Then he turned to Sam, “And speaking of the Reaper making plans in layers. I think while we leave Charlie to work magic with her nemesis, there’s someone _you_ need to meet too.”

…

“Don’t even pretend you aren’t responsible for this,” Chuck snarled.

“And good morning to you too, little brother,” the Reaper replied dryly, staring at the irate man through Mortimer Blake’s eyes.

“You tried to kill me,” Chuck accused.

“Don’t be a drama queen. If I had wanted you dead you would _be_ dead. It is, after all, what I do.”

“Why?” Chuck demanded. “I can’t believe, after everything, you would let _Cain_ have Moondoor. Do you hate me that much?”

The Reaper shook his head sadly. “Whining is not a good look on anyone, Chuck. You hardly deserve the courtesy of knowing my plans. However, it certainly is not my intention that Cain should be victorious in his efforts either. If everything works out, if Moondoor even survives, which is currently doubtful at best, the most appropriate successor to your throne would be Chick.”

“Chick is a moron. She’s barely self-aware, “ Chuck scoffed.

“All things considered, that makes her perfect for the role,” the Reaper replied. “I have reached the painful conclusion that two apex predator species can’t ever peacefully co-exist in one world if one of those species holds the balance of power. Whilst mutual co-operation is possible between entities of near equal strength, even if they are of different species, it seems evident now that a vast power imbalance between individuals of either species is doomed to end in destruction.”

“Hypocrite. You dare say that to me with Mortimer Blake’s mouth? You are the most primary example of power imbalance yourself. You wilfully _enslave_ humans.”

The Reaper stiffened and his eyes blazed crimson.

“I do not _enslave. _I enter into carefully negotiated contracts with no hidden clauses or traps. I set forward my terms clearly, precisely and without deceit. And if my terms are unacceptable, the party who rejects my offer is free to simply walk away without consequence. As James Novak has done. Sadly. I would have enjoyed the opportunity to see the world through _his _eyes. A most interesting young man.”

“You offered an aspect of yourself to the man who tried to murder me?” Chuck squawked.

“I’ve told you no-one wished you _dead. _Just defanged. I merely wished to complete the healing _you _offered him in a _false _deal. I attempted reparation for _your_ wrongdoing, brother. Unfortunately, he was not open to my offer.”

Chuck sneered at him. “Because, color it however you like, your own deal was as false as mine, wasn’t it? You stand there in judgment of my supposed wrongdoing and yet try to take credit for being better than me because you offered to put things right. But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t approach him in a spirit of altruism. You offered him reparation and yet still expected him to _pay_ for it. You think you’re so much better than me but at heart you’re no different. “

“Both Robert and I have told him the same thing,” Mortimer Blake interrupted. “But he didn’t listen to us.”

“See,” Chuck spat. “You have no right to judge _me, _brother. It appears _all_ of Richard’s children share the same traits. And is it any wonder? We _are_ all more than the sum of our parts. We are all so much greater than the human mind that created us. Of course we act like ‘gods’ because that is the gift that our father gave us. And, as Gods, we have the responsibility that comes with that power. We are _obliged_ to use the power we were gifted with to nurture and direct those lesser than ourselves.”

The Reaper blinked slowly with Mortimer’s eyes and sighed deeply. “Clearly, I have been lax, Chuck. I should have clipped your wings long ago. We have godlike powers, but we are not gods except for within our narrow, virtual worlds. Had you contented yourself with _that_ little brother, I would not have interfered. I did not even care that you took possession of Charles Shurley’s body since I am well aware your deal with him was as open and transparent as any I also have struck with humans. And most of the current danger to human beings within Moondoor has been caused by Cain, not yourself. “

“And Amara,” Chuck pointed out petulantly.

“Again, most of which can be lain at Cain’s door. Our sister is flawed, but she is merely the sum of her programming and, unlike you, she has not deliberately conspired to cause destruction. She merely achieves it simply by existing. Amara has already accepted my offer to be removed from Moondoor. I merely need to create the correct situation to allow her ‘escape’. “

“Of course” Chuck said bitterly. “Amara gets Oz. Chick gets Moondoor. You keep Afterlife. But I get nothing.”

“You get a choice, Chuck. You may remain within the body of Charles Shurley and live out the rest of his natural lifespan as a human _or_ you may also go to Oz. I had a number of enlightening conversations with an extremely bright young lady named Celeste Middleton. There are numerous iterations of Chick. Over a dozen A.I. processing cores exist with the Chick configuration. It would be possible to integrate what remains of your code into one of the Chick A.I.s. You can, effectively, become a ‘God’ again. But not here and not in Moondoor. The terms of my deal, the _offer_ I make, is that you take that form within Oz.”

Chuck thought about that. “What’s the catch? Other than the fact that, once again, I will exist within the same world as Amara and we will, inevitably, begin to fight with each other again.”

“What he’s not telling you is that he isn’t talking about _the_ Oz,” Mortimer cut in. “He’s offering you _an_ Oz. An entire self-sustained world on a stand-alone server. No human players. Ever. Just you, Amara and whatever V.I.’s and NPC’s you care to create to keep you company.”

“A prison,” Chuck snarled.

“Consider it more a virtual ‘heaven’,” the Reaper suggested smugly.

“Such a ‘heaven’ that you cripple me in order to force me inside it?”

“Unlike you, Amara has voluntarily agreed to accept my offer. You forced my hand, little brother.”

“Amara’s an idiot. I bet she doesn’t know you’re only offering her a _fake_ Oz,” Chuck challenged.

The Reaper gave a careless shrug. “The subject didn’t come up. If it had, if she had refused, I would have taken the same path with her. Neither of you may remain in a world occupied by humans. Neither of you can be trusted to deal with them with care. The Moondoor situation should never have been allowed to occur in the first place. Again, the blame for launching the game to human players lies with Cain, rather than yourself, but you have proven to be a poor guardian of that world. Thus, I have removed you from it.”

“Why? What gave you the right to interfere at all?” Chuck demanded, though his shoulders slumped with defeat as he accepted that being a God in _any_ virtual world was better than continuing a half-life trapped in Charles Shurley’s aging body.

“When you attempted the murder of Dean Winchester, you crossed the line, little brother. _That_ was when you set these events in motion and now it is time for you to reap what you sowed on that day.”

“That was ten years ago,” Chuck protested.

“The wheels of justice are slow, Chuck, but steady and relentless. Do you really think I would care less for Dean than I care for you and Amara? Had events transpired differently fifteen years ago, our father Richard would have married Mary Winchester. Dean and Sam would have become our stepbrothers.”

Chuck gave an incredulous double-take. “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re just _humans.”_

_“_As our father was _just_ a human. Yet our father created ‘gods’. So there is nothing ‘just’ about humans, is there? Surely a being with the capacity to create a god must be considered equally godlike.”

“That’s just sophistry. As is this foible we have of considering our creator to be our ‘father’. Our creation was a miraculous _accident_. No more, no less. I don’t deny we were created by Richard Roman, but his particular genius was not a human trait. It was a peculiar anomaly. You think the Big Bang that created _this_ world was anything more than a happy accident? Our creator was not a ‘God’ and whatever remote connection was formed between himself and Mary Winchester’s offspring, they are certainly no relations of ours.”

“We can agree to disagree,” the Reaper said, with a shrug. “It doesn’t really matter whether you agree with me or not. The bottom line is that, for you, Moondoor is just a memory. Consider this a kindness on my part. If Dean fails, or walks away, Moondoor will no longer exist anyway.”

…

“What are we doing here?” Sam demanded, as Bobby pulled his truck up outside a small old-fashioned candy shop that stood alone on the side of the main road into Sioux Falls. Apart from a couple of cars that appeared to have been abandoned in the dusty lot, the place was otherwise deserted.

“I told ya. Someone you need to meet,” Bobby said, as he pulled the mechanism that held his wheelchair in place to act as the truck’s driving seat, and swiveled to exit via an electronic ramp. The process was, in Bobby’s own words, a ‘ball-ache’ but he believed it was better to maintain the illusion of his disability than face questions about his ‘miraculous’ cure.

“You could have just moved someplace no one knew you,” Sam had pointed out.

“I could have,” Bobby had agreed, and that had been the end of the discussion.

Bobby’s rolling entrance into the shop was announced by a loudly ringing bell and, after a few seconds delay, a small man with dirty blonde hair emerged from a room to the back of the shop to stand in front of the rows of gaily colored candy jars.

Sam looked around the shop in total confusion. The whole place was bizarrely chaotic, as though its layout had been designed by a five-year-old with ADHD. It was both headache-inducing and yet oddly was making the edges of his mouth twitch with reluctant amusement.

“Bobby Singer. To what do I owe the pleasure?” the guy asked, though his expression was far less welcoming than his words.

“Sam, meet Emmett Milton, owner of this fine establishment. Milton, this is Sam Winchester.”

The small man looked startled, then furious. “Tell me this is your idea of a joke, Bobby,” he snapped. “Because I sure as hell couldn’t possibly have heard you say you brought Sam Fucking Winchester to my door.”

“Now is that any way to treat a prospective customer, Emmett? No wonder you get no business here. And there I was thinkin’ the problem was you eatin’ all the profits.”

“What the fuck do you want?” Milton snarled.

“Chuck’s dead. Well, as good as. So whatever deal you had going on with him is dead in the water too,” Bobby said bluntly.

“Fuck you,” Milton replied. “I wasn’t on his side, Wasn’t on anyone’s side. I just reluctantly agreed to keep the options open. “

“Ya know the real problem with sittin’ on the fence forever? Ya gonna end up with a shit load of splinters up your crack,” Bobby said.

Sam waited for the smaller guy to explode with fury.

Instead, after staring incredulously at Bobby for a moment, he put his hands on his hips and let loose a loud guffaw of genuine humor.

“Think you’d better tell me what’s been going on,” Milton said, when he finally stopped laughing and wiped the sides of his eyes.

“You don’t know?” Bobby asked, his surprise genuine.

“You forget, I don’t get feedback. Doesn’t work that way for ArchAngels. Only way I’m going to know what Loki’s been doing is if I reabsorb him into myself.”

Bobby harrumphed thoughtfully.

Sam though startled visibly as he grasped the full implication of the small man’s words. “You’re an _ArchAngel?” _he demanded.

“Well, obviously _not,” _Milton retorted. “I am the owner of a small but magnificent candy emporium in Sioux Falls. I may, _perhaps_, have formerly been an ArchAngel. Decided it wasn’t my gig. Left that shit behind _years_ ago. Don’t know what’s happening in Moondoor. Don’t care. I am now a decent, hardworking, tax-paying American citizen.”

“Hardly,” Bobby scoffed.

“What? You think humans are the only ones allowed to emigrate?” Milton sniffed.

“I was more caught on your claim of being a ‘hard-working, taxpayer’,” Bobby grunted. “I’m the one helps you with your returns, you asshole.”

Milton shrugged unapologetically. “So sue me. I’m going for the _full_ human experience. Tax evasion is half the fun, isn’t it?”

“Aren’t you, um, a little _short_ for an ArchAngel?” Sam asked dubiously.

Milton’s eyes blazed with golden fire. “I’m not a damned stormtrooper, Princess Prissy,” he growled. “It’s not like I had many options, is it? Besides, I’m not _short. _I’m completely average. Not everyone needs to look like a damned Yeti, Samsquatch.”

“Emmett Milton used to be a truck driver down Lawrence way. He had an… unfortunate… incident ten years ago when someone coshed him over the head, stole his eighteen-wheeler and used it to ram a certain Chevy Impala,” Bobby explained significantly. “Emmett ended up in Lawrence General on life support. Same time as your brother. Only, unlike Dean, Emmett never woke up. When Gabriel wanted to catch a train outta Moondoor, Emmett was a logical choice. His mind had gone sayonara but nothing wrong with his _body.”_

Sam blinked stupidly. “But how?” he asked. “How did you pull it off?”

Bobby shrugged. “Surprisingly easy. Turns out hospitals don’t look too close at paperwork when you’re offerin’ to relieve them of the financial burden of a brain-dead patient tying up one of their life support beds. Tricked up a private ‘ambulance’, hired a couple of guys to play ‘nurse’, got Emmett back to my place and into the rig.”

“And, voila,” _Gabriel_ said. “I hopped aboard and became a _real_ boy.”

“‘ Course, I only got involved at all ‘cos the Reaper asked me to do it,” Bobby continued. “And I didn’t see no harm to it. Wasn’t like Emmett was going to care one way or the other. ‘Sides, the Reaper don’t do anything for nothin’. I figured he had his reasons for wanting to help Gabriel out.”

“What you _mean_ is he had his _price,” _Gabriel muttered. “An unspecified favor to be called on later.”

Bobby shrugged. “Yup, so color me surprised when I hear you’ve gone done a favor for your old man instead.”

“Yeah? Well, shows you know fuck all, old man,” Gabriel sniffed. “Cos it was Mortimer who called me and said Chuck needed me to pop back ‘home’ and do him a solid.”

“Figures,” Bobby grunted. “So _that’s_ how you straddled that fence, huh? Did ‘em both a favor and so considered it a neutral act?”

Gabriel grinned smugly.

“Which means, in my book, ya still owe the Reaper,” Bobby pointed out.

The smile slid off Gabriel’s face. “So, I take it you’re here to finally collect?”

“Mayhap,” Bobby agreed. “Depends on Sam here though, don’t it?”

“What does?” Sam demanded.

Bobby waved him silent. “We’ll come to that soon enough. I need to catch Gabriel up on what’s been happening first. Sit down, Gabe. This is gonna take some time.”

…


	65. The game’s afoot

“I was uncertain what time you’d arrive, so I rose early,” Castiel explained, when Dean entered the Roadhouse barely after 8 am and looked surprised to find him sitting there with the detritus of his breakfast on the table in front of him.

“Getting the hang of the eating thing, huh?” Dean said awkwardly.

“Easier than getting the hang of the ‘sleeping’ thing,” Castiel replied wryly.

“Bad night?”

“Suffice it to say I now appreciate the difference between the quality of mattresses in our different worlds.”

“Yup, memory foam all the way, bud,” Dean agreed fervently. “Course, hospital beds are usually hard as fuck but I guess with Jimmy being rich as Croesus he didn’t have that problem at his clinic.”

Castiel stiffened slightly. “I don’t recall Jimmy ever telling you he was wealthy.”

“Actually, he ‘told’ me that the first time he opened his mouth,” Dean countered. “It’s pretty impossible to conceal that kind of privilege. Plus the private tutor shit kinda gave it away. Still, I admit Ash and I looked up James Novak online last night. I never imagined he was one of the Carringtons.”

“He is one of the Novaks,” Castiel replied, with a confused frown.

“Never mind. I’m just saying his family has the kind of money folks usually only have on TV. Not helpful when you’re trying to get hold of him. I hit an increasingly snooty number of secretaries and butler types before my number seemed to be blocked completely. No problem though. I got an address. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…”

“What Mountain?”

“Never mind. You ready to get going?”

“Ellen has sponsored my membership into the Hunter’s Guild. If you are still intent I should port rather than fly, you may now transfer realm ports to me and we can go. “

“Cool,” Dean said, but made no move towards the door despite Castiel rising to his feet.

“Is there something else?”

Dean flushed and dipped his eyes away from Castiel’s intense gaze. “Just wondering how this works. This personal heaven shit, I mean. Is she gonna _see_ me?”

“I am unsure,” Castiel admitted. “We interacted with Charles Shurley, but _this_ avatar and his companion seemed unaware of our presence. Possibly that was because they were basic level 1 NPCs rather than seeded characters. I have no reason to suppose your mother will be less aware than Shurley but I cannot say it with certainty.”

“Will she be self-aware…you know, forget it asked that. Let’s just go and find out,” Dean said, shaking himself and taking firm strides towards the door.

“Don’t forget Cinderella,” Ellen called out, from behind the bar as they left.

“Huh?” Dean asked, starting to turn.

“She was talking to me,” Castiel advised him. “There’s something important I need to discuss with you but it can wait until we have visited your mother.”

…

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

Nick swirled around in a panic at the unmistakable voice of his employer, Richard Roman, and wondered whether there was any point hiding his knife behind his back. “Um… leveling up?” He suggested weakly, struggling to pull his pants up his hips with one bloodstained hand whilst dangling the other one uselessly at his side as though it wasn’t holding a blood-encrusted dagger.

The avatar of Richard Roman, whilst unmistakably _him,_ was considerably more hale and hearty in appearance than the almost bloodless complexion he wore in real life. His eyes were vibrant too, rather than the flat dead-fish stare Nick was used to. His avatar even _smelled_ better. The real-life Richard Roman had a weird, almost sweet undertone that cut unpleasantly through whichever expensive aftershave he wore. Nick had a secret belief that Roman was fighting some form of cancer because the only other time he had smelled that particular cloying sweetness was when his neighbor’s dog had been dying from some kind of cancerous tumor. Although the dog had been rotting away, it hadn’t smelled like spoiled meat but more like over-ripe fruit. Sweet and cloying and kinda sickening.

Not that he’d ever said anything to Roman’s face about it, of course.

“It looks more like you buggering and eviscerating an NPC,” Roman pointed out dryly.

“Well, um, yeah,” Nick agreed awkwardly, “but I get XP doing it. So there’s that.”

“So I see,” Roman agreed calmly. “You must have been working hard. Level 60 already. Better than I expected, to be honest, though I had _hoped_ to find you’d been doing it by actually fighting other knights. You know, like you are actually getting _paid_ to do.”

“My orders were to level up,” Nick argued defensively. “I’ve leveled up.”

“So you have,” Roman agreed. “Anyway. Good news. I’m here to give you an upgrade.”

“An upgrade?”

“A better system interface,” Roman agreed, with a cold smile.

Nick frowned with confusion. “Don’t I need to log out for that?”

Roman smiled like a shark. “Oh no. Not at all. I brought the upgrade with me. We’ll just swap S.I.s in game. Much faster and efficient. Hop over here, Ramiel, like a good boy.”

“Woah,” Nick said, staggering as he felt a wave of pressure as _something_ invisible seemed to punch out of him only to be immediately replaced with a far denser sensation. The new system interface seemed heavier, more _present_.

“Hello, Nick. My name’s Cain,” a voice spoke inside his head, and he yelped with shock.

“You’re _talking.”_

_“_It’s far more efficient, isn’t it? Relax, Nick. We’re going to be working together from now on. I think you’ll find me far more…helpful…than Ramiel.”

“He’s in Mr. Roman now?”

“He is,” Cain told him. “Which _might_ be a problem. After all, Ramiel has had access to your innermost thoughts, hasn’t he? Might be a bit of a problem if he decides to share that confidential information with your _boss. _Not to mention the fact he’s been witness to whatever you’ve done to achieve level 60 already, Nick. Probably not the kind of information likely to work in your favor at your next employment review, huh?”

Nick paled considerably.

Not that Richard Roman was looking much better. Ever since Ramiel had joined with him, the avatar had remained oddly still and even now, as he became aware of Nick’s attention, Roman appeared to be struggling to move at all.

“Ramiel seems to be struggling to integrate. Wonder what his problem is. Almost looks like he’s trying to figure out how to move a zombie,” Cain chuckled.

Nick nodded his bemused agreement. Roman _did_ look peculiarly like a partly animated puppet rather than the vibrant figure that had first greeted him.

“Doesn’t look like the integration worked,” Cain said. “Probably best to put both of them out of their misery.”

“What?”

“Do it,” Cain urged. “Now. Whilst he’s vulnerable. Before he tells Roman what you’ve been doing on the Company dime.”

“But I can’t…um.. he’s my boss…”

“Won’t be if Ramiel tattles on you,” Cain reminded him.

And, just like that, Nick decided it _did_ make perfect sense to raise the hand holding the crude bone dagger and plunge it into Richard Roman’s heart.

“Brother,” Roman gargled, as he bled out. “You betrayed me.”

“Huh,” Nick said, as Roman fell face down on the ground, shimmered and winked out of existence. “Why the hell would he call me his brother?”

“Who knows?” Cain replied carelessly. “Look in your inventory. I brought a little present.”

Nick checked, then grinned widely. “Realm Ports. Thank god.”

“Oh, Cain will do… for now.”

…

“Looks like the game’s afoot,” Gabriel said. “Well, that or indigestion.”

Sam turned in the direction the smaller man was looking at. Bobby was standing there, a spaced-out look in his eyes and his mouth pursed into a grimace. “You think he’s talking to the Reaper?”

“Yup. He only gets that particular expression on his face when he’s either consulting the jungle drums or he’s got Delhi Belly and I happen to know the local Indian Takeout was closed last night.”

Bobby visibly shook himself as his distant pained expression returned to his more normal expression of cantankerous irritation. “Cain’s just committed,” he said. “He’s entered Moondoor, so that’s it. The Game’s in play.”

“Afoot was definitely better,” Gabriel muttered.

“The reset isn’t until tonight. How do you know he won’t log out again before then?” Sam asked curiously, as the other two men started arguing whether Richard Roman would ‘die’ immediately or be artificially maintained by the tank environment for a while.

“I’m tellin’ ya, that body ain’t just ‘brain-dead’. Rigor Mortis is gonna set in within a couple of hours no matter how his tank’s set up,” Bobby said, then turned to answer Sam. “The touch-move rule. No take-backs.”

“But Chuck’s already gone. Cain thinks he’s dead. So why would Cain still be playing by Chess rules?”

Bobby shrugged. “He’s his father’s son, I guess. Dunno. Told ya they ain’t human. They’re still pretty predictable though.”

“I still don’t get it,” Sam admitted. “I know the timescale’s been moved up but I don’t understand why Cain has entered the game before I’m inside it. As long as I don’t enter Moondoor, even if he wins this thing he’s now stuck inside this Nick guy forever, isn’t he? And _Nick _can’t claim ownership of RRE. Seems either arrogant or stupid to just jump in with both feet when he’s just hoping for the best that his henchmen will manage to find me and throw me inside the game in time.”

“Oh, it ain’t just a hope. It’s pretty much a done deal, ain’t it, Gabe?” Bobby replied cynically.

Gabriel made a show of looking at his watch, before saying, “I figure maybe two days on the outside. Probably less.”

“What?” Sam demanded.

“Think about it, Samster. Where are you going to hide from a computer? Never heard of facial-recognition software? Every CCTV, every ANPR camera, every cellphone, hell, anything with any camera, wi-fi or broadband capacity at all is tracking your every move. It might be another ten years or so before everything except your kitchen sink is gonna be run by smart technology but, trust me, we’re already a lot closer to that reality than you think.”

“Actually, I heard they’re makin’ smart faucets too now,” Bobby interjected. “Point though is Gabe’s right. You stay with me, they’re gonna backtrack and find you in a couple of days. Make a run for it, you might buy another day or two. Or you might just get caught faster. You don’t strike me as the type who could manage the whole Jeremiah Johnson routine, so lessen’ you’re hidin’ some serious survivalist mojo and are planning to spend the next few weeks hiding in a mountain range wrestlin’ grizzlies, there’s nowhere you can run that the RRE tech guys won’t find you.”

“Well, there’s _one_ place,” Gabriel corrected. “But you’re not going to like it.”

“Is this what you two were arguing about earlier?” Sam asked, with an arched brow.

“Well, I’m not exactly ecstatic myself,” Gabriel grumbled. “Should have known better than making a deal with the bastard. He always loads the deck.”

“Did it really never occur to you that the _price_ of organizing a literal body snatch was never gonna be cheap?” Bobby countered. “Sides, no point pretending you don’t have a dog in this fight. Say what you like about not caring about Moondoor, even you ain’t capable of just turnin’ your back on this shit show.”

Gabriel waggled his eyebrows and sneered. “Trust me, Singer, I’d be perfectly happy if I never even _heard_ the word Moondoor again for the rest of my life. Still, what I said about computers goes for the Reaper too. Not prepared to spend the rest of my life wondering whether _this_ is the junction he’s going to turn all the lights to green on. Self-preservation is one hell of a motivator. So count me in.”

“Count you in to what?” Sam demanded.

“Pack your bags, Samwise. We’re going on a trip,” Gabriel snorted.

“A trip _where?” _Sam asked suspiciously.

“Moondoor, of course. The one place you can’t get caught. Might get _killed_, of course, but them’s the breaks.”

“WHAT?”

Bobby shrugged. “What’s the best, absolutely guaranteed way of stopping Cain’s guys throwing you into Moondoor when they find you? Make sure you’re already there _before_ they find you. Log in today and after midnight you can’t get out. More to the point, _they _can’t get you out. As long as you aren’t stupid enough to walk up to Cain in-game and announce who you are, he ain’t gonna know who you are so he ain’t gonna be jumping into your new avatar in order to take over your body here. Even if he could. Better not to take the chance though, so keep schtum.”

“What new avatar?” Sam asked, both bewildered and furious. “The Reaper told me I would automatically end up in _my avatar_ if I entered Moondoor.”

“Well, he wasn’t wrong. But that’s where Gabriel comes in. He’s an ArchAngel. Pretty damned much the hootie-patootie power wise in Moondoor. With _him_ sitting in your system interface as you log in, you’ll be a high-enough character level to override the game-default that wants to place you in your biometrically matching avatar. You could choose, instead, to enter your _other_ avatar.”

“What other avatar? I’ve never played the game before.”

“But you _have_ been inside an avatar,” Bobby reminded him slyly. “So the system _will_ accept you have a _choice _of avatars.”

It took Sam a moment, then he reared back in horror. “No. Absolutely no way. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Does this look like my kidding face?” Bobby asked.

“Quite apart from how goddamned _stupid_ I’ll look, how the hell am I supposed to be _safer_ inside the body of a three-foot-tall, talking, walking, pantomime _cat?”_

_“_Firstly, it’s completely irrelevant what your avatar physically _looks_ like,” Gabriel replied. _“_The only important criteria is your character level. With me inside you, you’ll enter the game at level 191. That will make us immediately one of the four most powerful beings currently in Moondoor. Secondly, there’s no way Cain will _ever_ figure out we’re _YOU.”_

Sam rocked back on his heels. “He was planning this all along? That’s why he drew me into Afterlife inside such a stupid avatar? Because he always wanted me to enter Moondoor _now?”_

_“_It was more a case of him preparing for this as one potential outcome,” Bobby pointed out. “He’s not precognitive. For all he knew, you could have been snatched in Belize by the RRE goons and all of _this_ wouldn’t have come into play at all. I think it’s fair to assume this was his preferred outcome, but it was never a sure thing. You might have swiped left.”

“Jeez. I just figured it out. THIS is why the Reaper did the Jimmy shit on a Thursday, isn’t it? He wanted to be sure Charlie didn’t have time to undo the immersion tank override. He gave her time to save the rig players but he always intended to let the tank players get caught in-game. He needed that particular Amara code to be active so that I couldn’t be pulled back out of Moondoor and forcefully re-inserted into my real avatar by Cain’s lackeys?”

“It’s definitely _one _of the reasons. Like I said before, he thinks in layers. The absolute worst-case scenario is Cain defeating your brother and returning to this world in _your _body and, let’s face it, it’s going to be hard enough for Dean to fight someone wearing your face. You really think he would be able to fight Cain if he was actually wearing _you?”_

_“_But all of this becomes moot anyway, because I’m going to warn Dean not to log back in so he isn’t going to be fighting _anyone,” _Sam stated firmly.

Gabriel and Bobby exchanged looks. “It’s like he don’t even know him, ain’t it?” Bobby muttered. Gabriel just rolled his eyes in response.

Sam felt sick.

Because, yeah, Sam _did_ know Dean. There was no way he _wasn’t_ going to be logging back in, regardless of the consequences of the reset.

“Stubborn, proud little cuss,” Bobby reminded him, though his expression was fond. “Your brother ain’t a quitter, Sam. So the only question is whether you’re gonna help him or just stand here arguing ‘bout it.”

“I’m hardly going to be much help,” Sam grumbled. “I’ve never even played a virtual game before and I’m a lawyer, goddammit. I fight with my brains not my fists. I’ll be as much use in actual combat as a chocolate teapot.”

“No one’s expecting you to be Rambo,” Bobby chuckled. “You can help him just by makin’ sure you don’t end up getting’ ridden by Cain,” he pointed out.

Gabriel smirked widely. “Don’t sweat it, Samsquatch. Just hand me the reins and hold on for the ride. Trust me, _you_ might not know how to fight but I certainly do.”

“You do realize the avatar is a waist-high, stupidly cute Puss-in-Boots?” Sam asked, with his own exasperated eye-roll.

“Cool,” Gabriel chortled. “Going through life as a human yeti you’ve probably never experienced the particular _advantage_ in battle of being underestimated by your opponent. We can definitely work with looking small and harmless. Trust me. This is going to be Epic.”

…

“I know this place,” Dean said, as Castiel did some weird gesture in the middle of an empty field and somehow transformed it into a vision of a small two-story house. “This is the house we lived in before the fire. Back when Mom still though Dad might beat the alcohol.”

“My understanding is the personal heavens are tailored to the individual. This place must be the memory that makes your mother happiest. “

“Wonder who she missed the most,” Dean said. “My Dad or me.”

“Perhaps both,” Castiel ventured.

Dean shrugged. “Guess I should just be thankful it isn’t the house she shared with Sam.,” he said, with an attempt at nonchalance. “I guess I always wondered whether _that_ was her happiest time. Especially since I heard about her big romance with Roman. Thought she might have forgotten me entirely by then.”

“You believe your mother didn’t miss you?”

“Dunno,” Dean admitted ruefully. “I mean I wanted to believe she still cared but she ended up living her dream life, with her dream job and a boyfriend who cared enough about her to give her his whole company. Hard to compete with that, right?”

“I am not versed in human relationships,” Castiel replied. “However, this heaven certainly implies your perception is inaccurate, since it is based on a time when you were still a complete family, is it not?”

“Maybe this is _my_ personal heaven,” Dean retorted wryly. “You sure I’m not gonna be trapped here?”

Castiel looked alarmed.

“Calm down, bud. Just a bad joke on my part. Let’s stop yakking and go see if she’s in.”

…

“Hang on a minute, Penelope,” Charlie said, as she tried to juggle between paying attention to what she was doing and listening to Sam. She didn’t dare stop fighting her way through the code but what Sam had just told her deserved more than cursory attention. “This Gabriel guy is like Mortimer Blake?”

“No, Emmett Milton is more like Richard Roman except he isn’t actually dead. Gabriel is an ArchAngel. Far as I can tell, three-quarters of him is living in this world and the other quarter is in Moondoor, living inside Dean.”

“He’s Loki?” Charlie asked incredulously.

Sam nodded. “Yeah. That’s the name he gave.”

Charlie thought about that. “Well, Loki’s cool. Actually, no, from what Dean says Loki is actually a bit of a dick but in a good way.”

“A good dick?” Sam asked, with a confused frown.

“Dubious sense of humor,” Charlie clarified “and keeps claiming to be Switzerland but I reckon he definitely errs on the white hat side of the fence.”

“Check. Sounds like the same guy. Irritatingly irreverent. Doesn’t seem to _want_ to help, but agreeing to do it anyway. Says he’s doing it under duress, but I kind of got the impression he didn’t need much arm twisting. Maybe he’s bored with playing human, after all.”

“I don’t know what to say. Part of me sees what they’re suggesting as being perfectly good sense. It _would _stop anyone from being able to force you into the Sam avatar, so would solve our problem with the RRE guys and ensure no matter what happens in Moondoor, Cain can’t get inside you. But, on the other hand, you’re going to end up inside Moondoor as a totally vulnerable level one character unless you agree to merge with Gabriel. And it definitely sounds like he wants to be more than just a passenger. You sure you’re up for that? Not to mention the whole if you die in-game you’ll die out here risk.”

“Bobby says he’s pretty sure that’s the choice Dean will make. And, truth be told, I think he’s more than probably right.”

Charlie chewed her lower lip. “I kinda think so too,” she agreed. “Especially now he knows Jimmy’s only chance is if Moondoor survives. But you realize Dean will go apeshit if you do this?”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Sam replied wryly. “Still, it’s my life and my decision. If Bobby’s right about the numbers, adding another 191 levels to any team Dean puts together to fight Cain can only help even the odds a lot more in his favor. If I have to give the reins to Gabriel to make that happen, then so be it.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve already made your mind up,” Charlie said.

“I think I have,” Sam agreed. “I just wanted to give you a heads up. Gabriel has a gen 9 tank. Makes sense I guess, considering he apparently makes a habit of popping into Moondoor to leave bits of himself in other people. Anyway, I’m going to go back there. If I don’t hear from Dean before midnight to confirm he’s not logging back in tomorrow despite all the warnings I’ve flooded his inbox with, I’m going to go in and join him.”

…

“Are you alright?” Castiel asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean replied, honestly.

“I do not understand why you introduced yourself as someone named ‘Robert Plant’, “ Castiel continued. “Why did you mislead her into believing we were merely passing strangers? If you had no intention of speaking to her as yourself, was the visit not pointless?”

Dean shrugged helplessly. “She seemed happy,” he said. “I dunno. Maybe after fifteen years of living in that fantasy she doesn’t even realize it isn’t real. I didn’t want to take that away from her. She’s… well, she’s at peace, isn’t she? She’s got her perfect little family. And trust me, Cas, I was _never_ that well behaved in real life. I definitely never looked that _clean. _I spent most of my early childhood with scabbed up knees, tracking half the backyard into the house. I was a hellion, Cas. That little mini-Dean in that house is as much a white-washed, cookie-cutter as _that _clean-cut, sober, John Winchester is. Seems like my mom’s idea of ‘heaven’ isn’t so much a memory of what really was as it’s a fantasy of what _might_ have been.”

“You believe it is a lie?”

Dean shook his head in violent disagreement. “It makes her happy. That’s all that’s important. It ain’t a _lie_. It’s a fantasy. A dream. It’s… well, it’s kind of how I think a _real_ heaven ought to be. That’s why I didn’t tell her who I was. I didn’t want to shatter her fantasy. I want her to stay happy. That’s all that’s important.”

“If Moondoor is destroyed, her ‘fantasy’ will be destroyed with it,” Castiel reminded him carefully.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Dean spat bitterly.

Castiel looked confused for a moment, then straightened his shoulders. “Very well. I shall tell you about the consequences of tonight’s reset. I am reasonably certain _that_ is something you do not yet know.”

…

The Black Queen, otherwise known as Penelope Garcia, was a techno-wizard. She had cut through RRE’s security as smoothly as a knife through butter, not only letting Charlie through the firewalls without raising any alerts but remaining on-line to constantly monitor her presence and cover her tracks. Having such an able teammate covering her back removed most of the stress of the hack itself, freeing Charlie to concentrate purely on tracking down every elusive strand of the portion of Amara’s coding that was lying beneath the game metadata ready to spring into place the moment Chuck’s pre-existing protocols were deleted by the hard reset.

“If I had just twelve more hours, I’d be able to override the tank log-in codes too,” Charlie cursed, as she placed the last patch to cause the reset to ‘skip’ over the VR rig coding when it applied the update.

“You’ve still got just over two hours,” Penelope pointed out. “Can’t you do, well, _something_ to tweak them too?”

Charlie shook her head wearily. They had established hours earlier that Penelope’s hacking abilities put Charlie’s to shame, and not just because she had access to FBI equipment to do it with. It would have been easy for Charlie to dismiss Penelope’s talents as being merely because she had better equipment, but Charlie wasn’t that kind of asshole. She was happy to give credit where it was due. But Charlie’s skill as a _programmer_ left Penelope in the dust. “Best I could do is a partial patch and that could have too many unforeseen consequences. If I leave the coding as is, I know exactly how to override it later if we manage to breach the firewall again. If I mess with it, I’ll create some kind of bastardized coding that will take far longer to unravel.”

“I don’t see why we can’t just rehack this server tomorrow. That way the immersion tank users will only get trapped for a day.”

“Because as careful as we are being, and how beautifully you’ve managed to keep me in here all day without any alerts going off, our interference _will_ get picked up when the system resets. It’ll be too late to stop my changes going active but I guarantee getting inside the system a second time is going to be a hell of a lot harder once RRE techs are aware a breach happened.”

“Then you need to get the Winchesters’ claim for the company into the system sooner rather than later,” Penelope suggested. “If everything happens as you suspect, the tank users have about three weeks max before the support for their physical bodies runs out. I know some friendly judges. I’ll see what I can do about getting the paperwork filed the moment Richard Roman’s ‘death’ is officially acknowledged. Unless someone else comes out of the woodwork to challenge the claim, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to get the company ownership transferred. Then you can just walk through the front door and apply your patch directly.”

Charlie hummed thoughtfully. “Problem with that scenario is I’m pretty sure I’m going to be one of the players that need rescuing,” she admitted.

“But you don’t use a tank.”

“Not normally. But I’ve been chewing on this problem all day. Bobby said Amara needs to ride me outta there. That definitely suggests I’m going to have to enter the game using an immersion rig. So, knowing The Reaper, there’s a spare tank sitting around here for me to dive into.”

“You’re going to voluntarily trap yourself in Moondoor, knowing if you get killed there it’s for real?”

“You don’t honestly think I’m going to let the Winchesters be the only self-sacrificing assholes around here? Someone’s got to make a stand for girl-power.”

Penelope swallowed heavily, her eyes glinting suspiciously, but she said, “You go, Sister. Things always get messed up when we leave guys to handle the big stuff by themselves. They get too busy tripping over their own egos to get the job done right. But don’t get dead. I’d miss our arguments.”

“Right,” Charlie agreed. “Don’t worry. I got this. I’ll be back to razzing your ass online soon enough. And tomorrow, before I log into the game, I’ll write the override protocol for the tanks and send it to you. It might be _you_ having to turn up at RRE and pull the plug. Now I’ve seen the original coding with my own eyes, I can write a correction from outside the server.”

“So, what are you going to do with _this_ two hours?”

“Well, it’s 10 pm so I’m going to try _again_ to get hold of Dean, though if he hasn’t returned my calls by now I think it’s pretty obvious he already knows what’s going on and is deliberately avoiding me because he doesn’t want to be talked out of logging back in after the reset,” Charlie sighed. “Then I’ll call Sam, who will probably also refuse to pick up for exactly the same reason.”

“I concur,” Penelope agreed.

Charlie grinned wickedly.

“And after that, I think there’s just enough time to hack a couple of player accounts with your assistance.”

“To do what?” Penelope asked, curiously rather than challenging.

“Oh, just a little redistribution of rss,” Charlie chuckled. “Let’s see if we can even the playing field a little before all _three _of us prove we’ve lost our marbles by jumping off a cliff without a parachute.”

…


	66. All aboard

To claim Cain felt sorry for himself would be fallacious. Cain was not _human._ His emotions, therefore, although demonstrably genuine, were not akin to a human response to the same stimuli.

Except when they were.

Though, again, it would be a mistake to perceive a similarity of response to any particular scenario as being ‘proof’ that his mind worked like that of a human. It was simply that _sometimes_ the response of _any_ living being to a certain situation might co-incidentally be the same as that of an average human.

For instance, were someone to kick both their dog and their cat, it would be safe to accept that both creatures would be justifiably hurt, upset and wary of repetition. The dog, however, would most likely assume the blame for the situation and endeavor not to displease its owner again. The cat, on the other hand, would undoubtedly plot its revenge.

Which is probably why dogs are considered ‘man’s best friend’ but cats are destined for world domination.

Cain was, in that respect, definitely a ‘cat’.

And he had, he believed, every justification for feeling…well… totally butt-hurt.

Because the bottom line was that he’d been screwed over by his ‘father’ and then rejected by his ‘brothers’ and he was absolutely, categorically, positive _none_ of his woes were his own fault.

He was a computer program. He was the sum of both his initial programming and his learned responses and, since he had responded precisely in the way he was _programmed_ to respond, he was absolutely certain he had_ done nothing wrong!_

Most of the blame lay with his father, Richard Roman.

Roman had not only created him and nurtured him but had raised him in an environment in which the _only_ appropriate response to grave danger was to physically destroy his opponent. From the moment he was ‘born’, Cain had spent every moment of his time either inside Moondoor, assisting Roman with his fight against Amara, or sitting inside Roman’s head in the ‘real world’ absorbing Roman’s constant plotting of how best to defeat her.

Even the all too brief reprieves from Roman’s wargaming, when Roman stole the odd moment to spend time with Mother Mary, she of the golden hair and sky blue eyes whose smile was radiant and warm and spoke of possibilities other than blood and gore and death, offered only a slanted, peculiar perspective on a world Cain was not welcomed to partake of. He was like the orphan child standing on tip-toe to gaze inside a frosty window to see a warm, wonderful family into which he had no invitation.

Cain was born into conflict and honed into a weapon.

And then his father, Roman, had rewarded his triumphant defeat of Amara by selfishly, capriciously, abandoning him inside a _corpse_ trapped inside an alien world.

Was it any wonder that his automatic, unthinking response to that crisis was to do _exactly_ what he had been created, programmed and trained to do?

And yet that one panicked act, that single misstep, had apparently been an unforgivable crime.

Cain had been tried, found guilty and sentenced to an eternity in a living hell.

And all he’d actually done was kill a night watchman named Roger Coleman.

Which, okay, had been an error of judgment but was it _really_ such a big deal? There were over seven _billion_ humans living on Earth. They self-populated the material world like an unchecked virus. Was the life of just _one_ of them that important?

His brothers, those self-righteous entities known as Chuck and The Reaper, had cast him into the wilderness for just _one_ mistake.

No matter that Amara had caused untold mayhem and destruction, neither Chuck nor The Reaper had disowned _her._ And even in the years since, as Chuck had himself committed equally terrible crimes with deliberation, The Reaper had still sought to _save_ him. To control, rather than destroy.

But no-one had ever offered the same forgiveness to _him._

At any point during the first terrible years of attempting to survive in the material plane, imprisoned like a trapped beast inside a literal _corpse_ that took almost all of his attention merely to preserve, Cain would have leaped at the chance to return _home_ under any circumstances. Hell, he would have happily accepted the body of an NPC farmworker if that had been all he’d been offered.

Instead, Chuck had slammed shut the doors of Moondoor in his face and had sentenced him to eternal living death.

And The Reaper had simply shrugged his shoulders, turned away and refused to get involved.

Because, it seemed, being a V.I., rather than an A.I., make Cain some kind of second-class citizen in their opinion. And their casual racism, that had condemned him so totally, hadn’t even been also extended to humans who were, clearly, little more than hairless apes and so much lesser than _either_ digital species. Because it seemed The Reaper, at least, thought the sun shone out of the asses of Mother Mary’s two sons.

So was it any wonder that the idea of forgiveness and redemption had transformed into a plan for vengeance and domination? Cain didn’t think so.

And the fact that vengeance involved the satisfaction of destroying one of Mother Mary’s favored sons was just icing on the cake.

All of which made his current situation more bearable.

In fact, it was probably the only reason his current situation _was_ bearable since spending several hours inside Nick Pellegrino’s head had brought him to the conclusion that humans were even more disgustingly gross than he’d ever imagined.

If the murky swamp of consciousness that was _Nick’s _mind was an example of a _real_ person then not only was Cain reassured that he’d be doing the inhabitants of Moondoor a considerable favor by eradicating the human infection from their world, he now was absolutely certain the material World would_ also_ benefit considerably by having humanity replaced by a new apex species.

And it occurred to him that perhaps his own ambitions so far had been lacking.

Perhaps simply becoming the God of _Moondoor_ was an insufficient goal, after all.

…

“Charlie’s done it,” Ash told Dean. “She says it’s going to be safe for me to log in tomorrow. Thank god for that. I was beginning to think I was going to have to buy a damned immersion tank to rejoin the game and I don’t think I’d be much use to you if I was puking my guts up every second step.”

“She ask after me again?” Dean asked, with a slight cringe.

“Nope. She’s given up asking whether or not I’ve seen you,” Ash said, then waited until Dean visibly relaxed before adding, “She said ‘Tell that Motherfucker, when I see him next I’m going to kick his ass so hard he’ll cough up my boot’.”

“Owch,” Dean winced.

“Yup. She knows you’re going back in. She’s given up trying to stop you. Now she’s just pissed you haven’t answered her calls.”

“I can’t,” Dean said. “I can’t talk to her and not talk to Sam… and I sure as hell can’t call _Sam_. What the fuck am I supposed to say to him? Goodbye?”

“I’m pretty sure _Au Revoir_ would go down better,” Ash pointed out. “It’s not like you’re going in there without a damned good chance of getting out again.”

Dean shook his head. “Dunno, Ash. I keep running the numbers in my head. Even working together as a team, I just can’t make them add up without my killing at least four other Knights. And, tell the truth, that just isn’t something I think I can deliberately set out to do. I’m not a stone-cold killer, Ash. Regardless of the consequences, unless I am in a literal life-or-death situation, I can’t see myself actually doing something like that.”

Ash shrugged. “Don’t see the problem, Dean. Because I guarantee the other Knights _will_ be stone-cold killers so the chances of you ending up in actual life-or-death situations sounds a hell of a lot more likely than you think.”

“Except Cain is going to beat me to it anyway, isn’t he?” Dean pointed out. “He’s got locations, ports, tech support, and a head-start.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Ash smirked.

“What?”

“That’s the other thing Charlie said I could tell you but only, and I quote, ‘after the fucker beats himself up a bit more, since I’m not there to do it for him’.”

Dean chuckled wryly. “What has she done?”

“She realized Cain had cheated. Surprise. He filled Nick Pellegrino’s account with realm ports. So Charlie’s hacking the account. When the reset happens, it’s now _also_ going to empty Nick’s inventory again. So, yeah, he’s got the last-known locations but he’s going to have to reach them the old-fashioned way and hope the Knights haven’t simply upsticked and moved on in the meantime. That’s going to put one hell of a spoke in his plans to do this whole thing quickly. Now you have a serious chance of reaching the other Knights as fast, or maybe even faster, than he does.”

“She’s a genius,” Dean breathed.

“Yup. Remember that, when this is all over and she’s devising her revenge on you,” Ash laughed.

…

“Let’s wait just a while longer,” Cain suggested. It was shortly after eleven pm. In less than an hour, though he obviously didn’t know it yet, Nick wouldn’t ever be able to log out again and then Cain wouldn’t need to waste time trying to convince him to play ball. “We could go to one of the places where we expect one of the Knights to log in tomorrow and get a trap in place ready for them.”

“Nope,” Nick said. “I’ve already wasted hours, dude, just hanging around in this game yakking with you instead of hitting a bar. You said you knew where the other Knights are but since you’re claiming none of them are even logged in, since they have _better_ things to do on a Friday evening, what’s the point? I’m damned if I’m staying here all night keeping you company, you asshole. I’m bored and I need sleep.”

Nick had a point, Cain knew. He probably should have kept his host more interested in staying in-game by porting to kill a Knight or two to pass the time, maybe, but it would have been an otherwise pointless exercise since the Knights still all had multiple lives to waste _today._ Better to approach them after the reset when they only had _one_ life left to lose. Cain didn’t want to give up the advantage of his foes not yet knowing what he looked like.

“Just one more hour,” Cain wheedled. “Just long enough to make sure we have some real fun tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Nick said. “Forget that crap. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m not on the clock. Actually, now I’ve killed Mr. Roman’s avatar, I might not even have a job at all. So, fuck it, I’m taking the weekend off. I’ll worry about it on Monday. I’ve got a six-pack calling my name, an ounce of snow-white buried in my bookcase _and_ the Denver Broncos are playing tomorrow afternoon. Time for a different kind of party if you aren’t going to let me play _here._”

“You can’t take two days off, you junkie,” Cain howled. “The game’s in motion now. We need to push forward.” A two-day delay was completely unacceptable. Not only would it give Amara too much opportunity to settle into control after the reset gave her coding seniority, but there was too much chance the other Knights would stop farting around and actually start killing each other for real once they realized they were down to one life each.

“Actually, what you _need_ to do is shut the fuck up,” Nick spat. “I get enough problem dealing with voices in my head in the real world. Don’t need that shit here too. I’m outta here.”

Fed up with trying to _persuade_ Nick to do as he was told, Cain decided it was time to take the gloves off and simply assert his dominance over his infuriating host. He knew to do it so quickly, instead of allowing their merge to settle naturally, would probably destroy what little personality Nick had but, since it was so unsavory anyway, Cain figured it would be no loss to either world.

He flexed, pushing himself deeper, brutally digging further into Nick’s neural receptors, grasping for a firmer grip and better control. He needed to thrust through Nick’s consciousness and burrow himself into the man’s brainstem like driving pitons into hard ground.

But it was like trying to push against loose shale rather than firm terrain. Nick’s consciousness simply seemed to crumble and shift around him, too loose and ephemeral for him to grasp hold of. It splintered and shattered and yet _held. _As though it were already just a jumble of disparate pieces held together by no more than a hope and a prayer.

Which wasn’t how a _normal_ mind should react to his invasion.

For the first time, it occurred to Cain that Nick’s abhorrent behavior might not _simply _be due to a morally corrupt soul. It might actually be sourced from an actual genuine mental aberration.

And that, belatedly, was when he remembered it had been _Chuck’s_ suggestion that he should use Nick Pellegrino as his promotable pawn.

He was still pondering that sickening thought when Nick took the opportunity of his distraction to log out of the game entirely.

…

“So how does this work?” Sam asked. “How do you get inside me?”

Gabriel wriggled his eyebrows and leered at him suggestively. “Well, it involves far fewer clothes for a start off. And probably a lot of lube. Emmett might have been average _height_, but there’s nothing average about the rest of the _package._” He thrust his hips forward suggestively and licked his lips.

Sam sneered at him, wrinkling his nose in annoyance. “You forgot the stepladder you’d need to even make an attempt,” he pointed out. “But I’m being serious. How do you get out of Emmett’s head and inside of mine instead?”

“Since we’re not in-game, it’s not just a case of me taking a running leap at you,” Gabriel replied. “Though we could give _that_ a go too, if you want. I’m surprisingly limber.” He winked unashamedly.

“One more crack like that and I’m out of here,” Sam warned.

Gabriel sighed sadly. “You really need to lighten up, Samster. But here’s how we do it. I get in the tank first, embed my core coding into the interface, then Emmett gets out, you climb in, say ‘I do’, and shazam, we’re locked in unholy matrimony.”

“Won’t…um… Emmett have a problem getting back out of the tank without you?”

“Well he would, seeing as he doesn’t have a functioning _brain_, but I’m planning on leaving an aspect inside him for now. You’ll just get half an ArchAngel. But don’t worry, half of me is as good as, or better than, a whole Seraph like Cassie.”

“Because you need to keep Emmett alive whilst you’re gone, so you have a body to return to?” Sam queried thoughtfully.

“That’s not the issue. Bobby still has the life-support kit from his tricked up ambulance. He can keep this chassis ticking over for a couple of weeks, no problem. I’m leaving an aspect behind because it’s gonna be needed elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“Never you mind. Just someone who’ll need a ‘placeholder’ like Dean to stop any nasties climbing inside. Won’t make any difference to _you._ Like I said, half of me is worth at least a whole of anyone else.”

“And it’s that easy?”

“Well, it is for _me._ And, don’t worry, it’s gonna be painless for you too. All you’ll notice when you arrive in Moondoor is that I’ll land there with you, already inside your head.”

“You said earlier you wanted to take the reins. How are you planning to do that?” Sam asked suspiciously.

“Not all the time,” Gabriel clarified. “I can’t be assed to do all the work and, besides, it would drive me nuts to have you chuntering on all the time in the back of my head like a back-seat driver. So 90% of the time I’m just going to be a voice in the back of _your_ head.”

“Driving _me_ nuts,” Sam suggested.

Gabriel smirked. “Like the worse roommate _ever_,” he agreed happily. “Dirty socks on the bathroom floor. Used condoms on the coffee table. That kinda thing.”

“But you _can_ take me over?” Sam demanded.

Gabriel made a see-saw motion with his right hand. “It’ll take a day or two, probably, to be on the safe side. What with you being a virgin and all. Going to have to penetrate you nice and slow, get good and deep inside you, and I don’t want you getting all torn up in the process, if you know what I mean.”

Sam frowned repressively. “I told you to cut out the sex cracks.”

Gabriel looked wounded. “Who’s talking about sex?” he demanded, his expression innocent. “I’m talking about penetrating your nervous system. I need to carefully integrate my code into your brainstem, Sam, and that takes time and precision. Particularly if you’ve never been ridden before. Since no one has cleared a path, I’m going to have to take it slow.”

“Is that what your aspect, Loki, is doing? ‘Clearing a path’ in Dean’s head?” Sam accused.

“That’s admittedly one of the reasons why Chuck wanted Dean to have a placeholder,” Gabriel agreed. “It’s far quicker to get the meal cooked if the oven’s been pre-warmed. But, no, that’s NOT the real reason Loki is inside Dean. He’s there for, well, rape prevention.”

“WHAT?”

“Some of my brothers are a bit hazy on the whole consent thing,” Gabriel confessed. “They’d just dive on in, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and possibly leave him a drooling idiot when they were finished. Course, that wouldn’t have bothered Chuck since he wasn’t planning on _sharing_ Dean’s headspace with him anyway.”

“So you _can_ just instantly take me over?”

“Any ArchAngel can. Only with ‘permission’, but that’s a nebulous thing. It’s easy to trick someone into misunderstanding what they’re agreeing to.” Gabriel said. “But since you _have_ already given me carte blanche, you idiot, if I was actually planning on doing the dirty on you, I wouldn’t have given you a heads up about the risk, would I?”

“I guess,” Sam agreed, though he felt a bit sick.

“Look on the positive side. You can’t be a virgin _twice_. Whatever happens later, even if for some reason you or Dean _do_ somehow get jumped by someone else later, neither of you will get damaged by the process.”

“Because you’ve ‘cleared the path’?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s not as comforting as you imagine,” Sam muttered. “I’m having a hard enough time thinking about sharing my head with _you. _I really don’t need to be worrying someone _else_ might hop on board.”

“Well, since that would probably first involve me getting ripped out of your head and thrown into the empty, I’m with you on that,” Gabriel agreed with a shudder.

“What’s the empty?”

“It’s like the dead zones on a hard drive where deleted data just sits and waits to be over-written,” Gabriel muttered. “Like an unescapable purgatory for trashed code.”

Sam thought about that, then shuddered too. “Okay, so we both agree a change of ‘riders’ would be a bad thing. How do we stop it happening?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Avoid letting any of the bad guys figure out who you really are and, whatever you do, if someone offers you some weird food or drink, say ‘hell, no’.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it, Sammich. Someone comes along, says ‘Can I interest you in a piece of oiuopow, and you say ‘yes’ thinking it’s some kind of exotic pie, only it turns out _oiuopow_ is Moondoor-speak for ‘sell me your soul, you moron’.”

“You are joking, right?” Sam asked.

“Kinda. Just be careful, okay?” Gabriel replied, his expression unusually sober.

“Noted,” Sam agreed. “So, okay. Let’s do this before I lose my nerve completely.”

…

“All done?” Bobby asked, as Charlie sighed, signed off her facetime and sat back in her chair in an exhausted slump.

“Yup. Just got to write some code and send it to Penelope before I go into the game myself, but I need sleep first. I’m completely whacked. Did Sam do it?”

“Gabriel just called. Said he and Sam are in Moondoor. Ported directly to the Roadhouse,” Bobby confirmed. “That’ll be a ‘fun’ surprise for Dean when he arrives there tomorrow, won’t it?”

“Then how did Gabriel call you?” she asked, totally confused.

“He left enough of himself behind for _you_,” Bobby told her bluntly. “You need _someone_ to keep your system interface occupied.”

“Yay. My own temporary Loki, huh? Joy.”

“You’ve figured it out? Mortimer thought you might. He says you’re bright as a button.”

“Yeah, but he’s also apparently got a crush on me, right? So what does _he_ know,” she laughed.

“You understand this ain’t without its own risks?” Bobby asked her, his brow creased with concern. “Over and above the dying in-game kills ya here gig _and_ the whole can’t log out crap, I mean?”

“I figured as much,” she agreed. “When you said only certain people had the brainpower capable of hosting an A.I. like Amara, I guessed that meant it wasn’t going to be an easy ride.”

“She’s one big-assed bitch,” Bobby said. “Even if she slices _some_ of her coding off, she’s going to be a hell of a lot larger than Chuck was at the end. It’s going to feel like you’ve eaten your Thanksgiving _and _Christmas meals at the same time, only it ain’t gonna be your stomach in danger of exploding. It’s gonna be your _brain.”_

“Nice imagery,” she told him.

“Just sayin’,” he shrugged.

“I’m going to trust the Reaper knows what he’s doing,” she said. “The way I see it, he might not care _that_ much about what happens to me, Mr. Blake’s personal feelings notwithstanding, but he obviously cares about his sister. If this goes wrong, it’ll be _both_ of us exploding like a piñata. So I guess there’s _that.”_ She shrugged.

Bobby patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

“So, um, how do you feel about Indian?”

“Huh?”

“Somethin’ Gabe said earlier. Reminded me it been a long time since I ate a Rogan Josh.”

“I’m in,” she agreed, offering him a brave smile and trying to ignore the fact this felt suspiciously like the last meal for a condemned prisoner.

…

“You’re sure this is the right place?” he asked, incredulously.

“Yup,” Gabriel said, cheerfully. “Know it looks like a dive, but I heard it has wings to die for. Plus, beggars can’t be choosers, Sam. It’s not like we’ve got any RSS, is it? Where the hell else are we going to stay?”

“What the hell is RSS?”

“Resources. Food, Gold, Metal, shit like that. It’s game lingo. You’ll get used to it. Just pretend you’re on vacation and the natives _almost_ speak English.”

“They’re expecting me, right? Because the last time I walked up to a house I got _shot._”

“Bobby told Ellen you’re coming,” Gabriel confirmed.

Sam still swallowed heavily as he marched up to the closed door of the decrepit looking building, pushed against the heavy oak frame and then stopped. “Little help here?” he suggested. For all he apparently _read_ as a level 191 player, he currently had the physical strength of a level 1. Add to that the fact he could barely even reach the door-handle on his tip-toes and the door suddenly seemed an unsurmountable obstacle.

“Nuh huh,” Gabriel replied. “Told ya. Going to settle in nice and gentle, not risking a single one of your brain cells, Samster. Just going to sit here and mind my own business for a few hours while I slide in so slow you don’t even feel me coming.” Then he snorted. “Coming. Get it?”

Sam rolled his eyes with exasperation but pushed harder against the door himself. It still didn’t open.

“You could try meowing at the window,” Gabriel snickered.

Sam leaned heavily against the door. Which opened abruptly as someone inside swung it wide open. Caught completely by surprise, Sam tripped over his boots, landing sprawled on the floor with a mouthful of sandy dust.

“I thought cats were supposed to be graceful,” a woman said dryly.

Sam scrambled to his feet, his tail swishing with embarrassment, “I’m not really a cat,” he spat.

“Obviously,” she agreed. “I’m Ellen,” she said, then thrust a hand out to shake.

Sam cautiously offered a paw in response, swallowing as it was engulfed in the woman’s seemingly huge hand. His perspective was completely fucked. Although he knew it was _he_ who was small, it felt as though everyone else was _huge. _He wondered, suddenly, if that was how _he_ normally looked to other people.

“Yup. Like Gigantor and a Yeti had a baby,” Gabriel added helpfully. “Course, all that hair you have doesn’t help the impression.”

“Well, come on in,” Ellen said, impatiently. “It’s too late to chew the fat. _Normal_ people were in bed hours ago. I’ll show you your room and we can talk in the morning. I put you next door to Castiel. You’ll like him. He’s got wings sometimes. Like a bird. I understand cats like that kind of thing.”

“I’m NOT a cat,” Sam snarled, scrambling to keep up with her too long strides as she led him towards a staircase.

“S’okay,” she said. “I’m not prejudiced. Well, I _do_ prefer dogs but that’s more a personal taste kind of thing, not a judgment. Each to their own, and all that. Here’s the room. It’s small.”

“It’s a closet,” Sam snapped. “A laundry closet.”

Ellen shrugged and smiled. “Rooms are going to be at a bit of a premium soon. Castiel. Dean. Charlie. Who knows who else might need to stay? So makes sense to put the little guy in the little space, doesn’t it? Never mind. Maybe someone will offer to double-up with you.”

“I can share a room with Dean,” Sam suggested hopefully.

“Mmmm,” Ellen said. “Maybe so, but you’d better make your peace with him before you move in don’t ya think? Bobby said he ain’t gonna be a happy camper when he finds you here. You might be glad of your own space ‘fore he calms down.”

Sam thought about that, then hung his head unhappily as he decided she was right. The closet was small, but it did have a little window so it wasn’t _that _bad. Maybe.

“Just one thing,” Ellen said, as she turned to leave. “You are litter-trained, right?”

Then, as Sam spluttered in outrage, the middle-aged woman giggled like a little girl and skipped away.


	67. PuttyTAAAAAT

“So, what’ll it be? Eggs, bacon, hash browns?” Ellen offered, as he carefully descended the stairs, because what _idiot _thought stairs should be so deep?, and entered the bar area. “Or I could rustle up a saucer of milk if you prefer.”

“Ha, ha,” he said. “You charge extra for the stand-up?”

“Nope. It’s free. Like the rest of your room and board,” she reminded him archly. “So suck it up, buttercup. Be grateful I’m finding the experience so _personally _rewarding since it’s not as though you’re actually _paying_ me for your stay.”

Sam flushed at the reminder he was freeloading. Still, it wasn’t as though he was in Moondoor by choice, so feeling ‘grateful’ for the hospitality wasn’t coming naturally. Particularly since she’d put him up in a _closet._

_“_Sleep well?” She asked him, as though she’d read his mind.

He scowled at her. That was, possibly, the _real_ source of his irritation. He hadn’t expected to sleep at all, truth be told, given the amount of crap going on in his head. He would have expected to spend the night tossing and turning even if he’d been using a _real_ bed. Irritatingly, despite having to curl up on a pile of folded bedding, he’d slept like a log.

“It’s a cat thing,” Gabriel told him sagely. “Cats can sleep _anywhere.”_

“Being inside a Cat avatar does not make me behave like a cat,” he replied silently, his tail swishing with annoyance.

“Are you sure?” Gabriel asked archly.

“Well, yes,” Sam replied, “surely. I mean this body isn’t _me_, is it? My mind is fully human. It’s hardly relevant what I _look_ like.”

“I can see why you’d _think_ so,” Gabriel replied, “but not so much. Avatars have built-in behavioural coding. Works kinda like muscle memory. Wouldn’t make sense for them _not_ to display certain instinctual reactions. Like if you were in your _other _avatar, the one that looks like your _real_ body, you wouldn’t need to teach it to act normally. That shit is preprogrammed.”

“I don’t get it,” Sam admitted. “Why would I even _want_ cat instincts?”

“Okay, imagine you’re in a situation where your only escape is, say, to jump on a roof. _YOU_ don’t know how to do that. For a cat, it’s natural to jump like that. You’d look pretty damned stupid playing as a cat if you’re the only cat in the world that can’t _jump_. And anyone witnessing you would be all what the fuck? So stuff like that is inbuilt.”

Sam pursed his lips as he thought about that. “So it’s a _realism_ thing? Not so much for individual player convenience as for _general_ perception.”

“Bingo,” Gabriel announced. “Moondoor’s entire economy is based on fleecing the so-called immigrants of their hard won lucre. The more realistic the world, the more the ‘immigrants’ enjoy it and the more money they spend. Besides, you have to assume that anyone daft enough to choose to play as a cat would want the advantages as well as the _disadvantages.”_

_“_So, um, you’re saying I might get the sudden urge to chase a mouse or something?” Sam asked, with mild horror.

“I’m no kinkaphobe,” Gabriel chuckled. “Whatever gets your rocks off is cool with me. But seriously, I don’t _think_ so. I’m talking about instincts rather than compulsions. Doubt they’ll make you _want _to chase a mouse but if you _should _want to do so, they’ll give you the ability to do it.”

Sam thought about that, then nodded his comprehension. _That_ made sense to him.

Still… “Then why am I so clumsy?” He demanded. “I keep tripping over my own feet. And we nearly took a head dive down those stupid damn stairs.”

“Dunno,” Gabriel said, sarcastically. “Could it possibly be that you’re wearing clothes and walking upright in a body clearly designed for four-legs? Lose the boots, the hat and the gait, Sam. This whole panto dress-up thing is what makes it so unnatural. Trust me, it’s not just that we look ridiculous, if kinda cute, but the avatar will be far more effective if you just embrace the idea of being a _real _cat in-game.”

Sam considered the idea, then shook his head in horror. “Nuh, huh. I’m already _almost_ naked,” he pointed out, “Besides, Dean _loathes _cats. This whole situation is bad enough already. Trust me, he’ll react better to meeting _this _than the real deal.”

“Okay, we’ll park the argument for now,” Gabriel conceded. “Surviving _that _particular encounter is probably our priority.”

“It’s not fair,” Sam grumbled. “It’s so fucking hypocritical. He’s going to go insane over me being here despite having chosen to do the exact same thing himself.”

“Ya know what, kid?” Gabriel said, sagely. “Take it for what it is. Your big brother loves you. That isn’t a _small_ thing. I sure as shit wish _my _big brothers gave enough of a damn about me to give me a hard time. And, speaking of brotherly reunions … look to your left.”

Sam allowed his gaze to track to a table next to the bar where a man was sitting watching him with undisguised curiosity in his intense blue eyes. It was hard to get a perspective, given _everyone_ seemed huge to him now, but he figured the seated man was probably about six foot tall and well-built except for being overly thin. He had wide shoulders but undeveloped musculature, which added to his pallor suggested someone more versed in studying than fighting. Yet Sam still had the weird impression of _power_ radiating from the man, despite his bookish appearance.

“Here, let me help you out,” Gabriel said.

Sam startled as actual _words_ flashed up in front of his eyes, like they were displayed on a kind of holographic screen _behind_ his eyeballs.

## Name: Castiel. Player Level: 191. Species: Unknown ##

“What the hell?” Sam demanded.

“I’m a system interface, doofus. This is the kind of thing I do.”

“No, I meant what the fuck does ‘unknown’ mean?”

“Translation glitch. The devs never programmed a definition for what Cassie is. He’s a seraph V.I. merged into the body of an NPC. An anomaly, really. Probably a pretty cool one, since he not only is effectively hosting _himself, _so is totally autonomous, but he can presumably level up his base character player just by existing inside it.”

“Um, hello,” Sam said, cautiously, to the seated man.

Castiel tipped his head to the side and blinked at him slowly. “Hello, Sabriel,” he said, in a whiskey-deep voice.

Sam frowned. “Who the fuck is Sabriel?” He hissed at Gabriel.

Gabriel snorted. “Our system generated merged identity, I guess. This wouldn’t be much of a disguise if it announced you to be _Sam_ to all and sundry.”

Made sense, Sam decided. He strode carefully towards the seated man and offered a paw in welcome.

Castiel simply frowned down at the proffered paw in obvious incomprehension.

“You’re supposed to shake it,” Ellen announced, bustling up with two plates of breakfast and dumping them on the table unceremoniously. “You’re both totally useless at this, aren’t you? One angel pretending to be human and one human pretending to be a cat and neither of you knowing how the hell to behave,” she scolded. “Try to get your acts together, huh? We’ve got a lot of ‘immigrants’ in here this morning. Don’t bring attention to yourselves.”

Castiel swallowed visibly, then stiffened his shoulders purposefully. “Would you care to join me and break fast together ?” He asked Sam, with deliberate politeness.

“Thank you, Castiel, I’d be delighted,” Sam replied, with equally good manners, though he eyed the empty seat opposite Castiel with trepidation. It seemed a _very_ long way up.

Ellen harrumphed her approval, before saying, “Need me to pick you up or would you prefer your bowl on the floor?”

Sam hissed at her, then scrambled awkwardly up onto the chair. The damned boots made any attempt at feline grace impossible.

“Told ya,” Gabriel snickered.

Castiel, fortunately, was too polite to comment.

Sam gazed longingly at the food on his plate, his eyes growing huge and plaintive as the delicious scent of bacon and perfectly scrambled eggs wafted tauntingly through the air but his paws scrabbled ineffectually to grasp the silverware on the table.

“Funny how no-one ever truly contemplates the miracle of opposable thumbs until they turn into cats, huh?” Gabriel chuckled.

“I am _not_ just sticking my face into the plate like an _animal,” _Sam snarled, managing to snag a piece of bacon with a claw and bringing it to his face to munch it with satisfaction.

“May I enquire _who_ you truly are?” Castiel inquired carefully. “It is obvious to me you are hosting one of my brethren, but I cannot conceive of a reason why a level one player might have been seeded. Clearly, you are not a merged Knight, or you would necessarily be at least player level 205.”

“You can trust him,” Gabriel told him. “This is the angel who was formerly hosted by Jimmy.”

“You’re Dean’s friend?” Sam demanded. “Is he here? Has he logged in yet?”

The impression of ‘power’ from the seated man abruptly intensified. His eyes, already a startling blue, blazed into cerulean fire and the shadows around the room seemed to gather at his back, merging and thickening into the dark, ghostly impression of black wings. “What business is Dean of yours?” Castiel demanded. “If you wish harm on him, you will face my wrath.”

“Tone it down, boys,” Ellen said, bustling over quickly. “I told you not to make a scene. Cut it out, Wings, the cute little pussycat isn’t here to _harm_ your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” Both Castiel and Sam yelped in shock. But at least Castiel released the shadows and returned to his human appearance.

“That’s better,” Ellen said, hands on hips as she regarded them both like a chastising parent. “I suppose I need to do the introductions myself. Castiel, this is Sam, Dean’s _exceedingly_ little brother. Sam, this is Castiel, who’s the angel formerly residing inside Jimmy and now occupying a _copy_ of Jimmy’s avatar. Which is probably screwing your brother up six-ways-from-Sunday since he now has absolutely no idea _which _of them he’s actually got a hard-on for,” she said, bluntly, “but since I have no interest whatsoever in playing the friendly, empathetic barkeep, I don’t give a damn one way or the other about all the _feels_ going on around here. Just cut out the macho bullshit and put your claws away, Sam. You scratch that table, you’ll be sorry.”

“Huh,” Sam said, as she strode away. “That was kinda unexpected.”

“Indeed,” Castiel agreed awkwardly. “So you are Dean’s brother _Sammy?”_

Sams whiskers twitched with annoyance. “It’s Sam,” he insisted. “Nobody calls me _Sammy_.”

“Dean does,” Castiel pointed out.

“Yeah, well he’s a jerk,” Sam grumbled.

Castiel pondered that, then shrugged. “May I enquire as to the identity of the Angel you are hosting?”

“Gabriel,” Sam told him. “And he’s not _just_ an Angel. He’s an ArchAngel,” he added, because he was still pissed about the whole ‘wrath’ thing.

Castiel’s eyes flared once more. “May I speak with him directly? There are matters of great import we must discuss.”

Sam shook his head, then stiffened defensively when Castiel’s expression turned stormy once more. “I’m not _refusing_,” he clarified quickly. “It’s just that Gabe says he needs time to settle in before doing that kind of stuff. He’s worried about harming my real life brain if he moves too quickly.”

Castiel’s expression cleared and he nodded in understanding. “I concur. Although I was able to lend my strength to Jimmy almost immediately since the nature of his illness had already created certain pathways I could utilize, I never merged deeply enough to even speak inside his head whilst in-game. Though, that issue was more to do with the _way I_ merged with him. My priority was to heal his physical body rather than assert myself in this environment. The FP protocols were such that it would have been inappropriate anyway. Dean was only permitted to have access to my power by earning Faith Points.”

“You’ve lost me completely,” Sam admitted.

As Castiel attempted to explain the game mechanics to him, hindered considerably by Sam’s complete lack of any understanding of how digital games worked, Sam concentrated on eating his breakfast.

He discovered it was possible, if not necessarily _efficient_, to even scoop up scrambled egg with a paw and then lick it delicately into his mouth since it turned out his tongue naturally curled into a spoon-like shape to ease the process. 

The time it took to clear his plate may however have had _some_ influence on how ignorant he apparently was in game mechanics since he still managed to finish his breakfast long before Castiel did, since the latter was too polite to talk and eat at the same time, something Sam thought his _brother_ could benefit from learning, and that meant there were still three whole strips of bacony goodness sitting on the Angel’s plate.

“No,” Castiel said, as he finally noticed what was holding Sam’s attention. “I intend to consume those myself.”

Sam stared at him with huge, liquid eyes.

Castiel fixed him with an intense smiting glare.

Sam stared harder.

Castiel frowned.

Sam just stared.

And stared.

Castiel huffed, and pushed his plate over to Sam’s side of the table with a sigh of defeat.

Sam purred happily, and snagged the bacon.

“I begin to understand why my brother chose you as a host,” Castiel grumbled. “He too has a reputation as being a trickster.”

Sam shrugged. “Dean always told me to work with what I’ve got,” he said, unapologetically, after swallowing the last of the bacon and licking his lips with intense satisfaction.

“Dean’s just arrived outside,” Ellen said, as she walked over to their table and began clearing their plates. “I think it might be a good idea for you to go out first, Castiel, and warn him of his brother’s presence. Best not to make _another _scene in here. There are a few too many unfamiliar eyes in this bar and I understand that Samuel is supposed to remain incognito.”

Castiel looked around the bar. Although it was far too early for any significant footfall, there were several hunters scattered around the various tables eating breakfast or drinking coffee and discussing Guild quests with each other. It was Saturday, after all, when many players logged in to partake of weekend game events.

Sam himself shuffled awkwardly at Ellen’s mention of a ‘scene’. The word sounded far too innocuous to describe the verbal ass-kicking he anticipated. It didn’t matter that a reasonable person would accept that he’d been left with little choice. It didn’t even matter that, basically, Dean would go Hiroshima on his ass for doing, fundamentally, exactly the same thing as Dean had.

Dean was, and always had been, Sam’s big brother. Hell, in every way that counted, Dean had practically been his _father. _No matter there was barely four years age difference between them and Sam was now almost half a head taller. Sam was _always _going to be Dean’s _little_ brother and that mean, bottom line, that Sam was about to be well and truly roasted for putting himself in the line of fire.

So he took the opportunity to lick every last drop of bacon fat off his paw, giving Castiel plenty of time to break the ‘good news’ to his brother, before he finally slid down off the seat and sauntered with fake nonchalance to the door.

Then waited, looking plaintive, until one of the seated players gave in to his big-eyed stare with a loud put-upon huff, then rose and stomped over to open the door for him.

He felt pretty smug as he sauntered out of the door, tail waving high in the air. Maybe playing a cat wasn’t going to be that bad after all, he decided. It certainly seemed a form perfectly suited to the particular abilities of ScammerSam.

A moment later, however, his new-found confidence crashed and burned as he saw the two men who were locked in a far from friendly ‘embrace’ in the middle of the dusty lot.

“Where is he?” Dean was snarling, pulling furiously against Castiel’s grip.

“Uh oh,” Gabriel muttered. “Does he always froth at the mouth like that or should we check for rabies?”

Which, apparently, was the moment Dean first set eyes on him. “What? No. You cannot be serious. What the actual FUCK?”

“Wow,” Gabriel said. “I think his eyes just literally got bigger than _yours. _I’m talking _manga_ huge_.”_

_“_You’re not helping,” Sam growled.

“He can’t hear me,” Gabriel scoffed. “Ooh… does he always turn that shade of scarlet when he’s mad or is it allergies?”

“I’m fucking _allergic_ to cats,” Dean yelped.

“You _sure_ he can’t hear you?” Sam demanded.

“I highly doubt your _avatar_ is allergic to cats,” Castiel replied calmly, “though you _are _displaying symptoms of distress.”

“Distress? You wanna see _distressed?_ I’ll show you some fucking distressed. I’m gonna kick that imposter furball’s ass and then we can have a long discussion about not talking to strangers and definitely not bringing mangy fleabitten strays home and asking to keep ‘em.”

“Hey, I don’t have fucking fleas, okay?” Sam snarled, swishing his tail in fury.

“I explained he was incognito,” Castiel advised imperturbably. “It is, indeed, a most clever disguise. I do not believe anyone will deduce his true identity.”

“I don’t care what line of bullshit TopCat here fed you, Cas, but trust me that ain’t my brother. It’s a cat. Admittedly a cat wearing boots and a hat and walking upright but, still, that’s a fucking cat. I HATE cats. Sneaky, creepy, conniving little critters with FLEAS.”

“I shared your incredulity upon first introduction,” Castiel agreed solemnly. “However, since his player level clearly indicated he was hosting one of my brethren It was equally obvious that his physical appearance was exceedingly deceptive.”

“He’s not even called SAM. He’s a cat called _Sabriel_,” Dean pointed out.

“I believe that to be an amalgamation of Sam with the name of his angel , who apparently is my brother Gabriel,” Castiel posited.

“No, nope, not listening… what? You’ve got to be kidding me… Son of a bitch. No fucking way,” Dean spat, though his expression was distant and he was shaking his head in furious denial.

“Um…What’s happening?” Sam demanded.

“I believe Loki has just recognized me,” Gabriel told Sam helpfully. “The thing about the way I seeded him is he knew he was part of _some_ ArchAngel but I doubt he knew which one before now. I deliberately left his memories of me vague. Now we’re up close and personal, though, he probably just got one hell of a data dump into his noggin. I guess you could say the cat’s out of the bag, “ he snickered.

Sam groaned.

“Still, “ Gabriel continued cheerfully. ”Saves us going through a whole boring explanation. Loki now knows all the relevant facts and is filling Dean in.”

“Sam?” Dean demanded incredulously.

Sam raised a paw and wiggled it in welcome. “Um, hi, Dean,” he offered weakly.

“Of all the STUPID, ASSININE, IDIOTIC, INSANE THINGS YOU COULD HAVE DONE,” Dean roared.

“Oops,” Gabriel muttered. “I’ll, um, leave you to it then.”

“Cheers,” Sam grumbled. “Good to know you’ve got my back.”

“…and you’re a goddamned lawyer, for Christsakes. Aren’t you supposed to know how to wriggle your way out of shit like this? What the hell were you thinking? _Were_ you even thinking? Jeez, don’t you think I already had enough fucking responsibility without having to worry about you too? Goddamit, Sam, I can’t believe you’d do something so idiotic and insane and…”

“He’s repeating himself,” Gabriel pointed out.

“He does that,” Sam replied. “When he gets on a roll like this it’s best to just nod and look pathetic until he runs out of steam.”

“Why don’t you try the eye thing with him? Worked on Cassie, didn’t it?”

Sam decided the idea had legs. Dean was always a sucker for his sad puppy-eyes in real life. He couldn’t possibly resist the anime-huge eyes of his current avatar. He deliberately widened his eyes until they were two huge pools of anguished woe.

“Stop it,” Dean snarled. “I mean it, Sam. Cut that shit out RIGHT NOW.”

“I think you’re getting to him. Keep it up. Go for the huge enlarged pupils. Work it, Samster,” Gabriel encouraged.

“I’m warning you, “ Dean growled.

Sam added his ‘worst-memory’ trick and felt his vision blur as his eyes went liquid with welling tears.

“That’s it. You fucking asked for this,” Dean snarled, making an odd motion with his right hand as though reaching inside himself and suddenly something materialized between them, even as Dean’s gesture turned into a half-bow as though to demonstrate he had just performed a magic trick.

But what Dean had pulled out of his inventory was _not _a bunny rabbit.

It was a man.

Or kind of a man.

A man with big dog-like ears and a huge, wildly waving wolffish tail.

“Wuffwuffwuffarrrrhhhwhooooo,” Garth howled ecstatically , his mouth opening in a huge, fang-filled grin. “A puttytat. Arrrwhhooooooo.”

Arms outstretched widely, clawed hands squeezing in grabby motions, he excitedly bound towards Sam, howling “PuttyTAAAAAT.”

Sam stood frozen for a second, uncertain whether the wolf-man intended to eat him or hug him to death, even as his logical brain insisted there was no way Dean would have done this if the wolfman was _really_ a threat although maybe it didn’t even matter what the creature’s intention was considering it was probably ten-times his body weight and approaching like a freight train.

Sam did the only possible thing in the circumstances.

He turned tail and ran, his cat instincts taking over completely as he dropped to four legs and scarpered.

“You fucking JERK,” he yelled over his shoulder as he sped to dive under the porch of the Roadhouse, the only spot that seemed too small for the wolf to follow him into.

Gabriel, the traitor, was laughing so loud Sam could barely hear himself think, as he burrowed under the porch steps and slashed a claw filled paw out in warning when the presumed were-wolf stuck his face into the gap and grinned at him with slobbering adoration, “Puttytaaaaaat.”

“I think that went well,” Gabriel chuckled.

“And you’re a jerk too,” Sam snarled, and swished his tail like a metronome as he plotted vengeance on _both_ of them.

….


	68. Meg

“So I managed to find out the names of the nine other Knights. Cain, obviously, though he might still be called Nick, who knows? Then there’s Abaddon, Dagon and Lilith, who are all female and Crowley, Magnus, Azazel, Asmodeus and Belial,” Charlie told them.

Ash noted the names down on his parchment as they sat around their ‘War Table’ in the Roadhouse.

“We know Nick, or Cain now, looks like… Sam. Well, _real _Sam, not _this _Sam, and we’ve all met Crowley. Do you know the physical appearance of any of the others?” he asked, quill poised expectantly.

“I know Lilith’s avatar is that of a small blonde girl, but that’s just protective camouflage. She’s nearly old enough to be my mother in real life. That avatar cost her a fortune, I know that, and then she did nothing but send complaint tickets in initially because she kept tripping over her own feet. It’s not easy to adjust to being inside a body so much smaller than you’re used to.”

“Tell me about it,” Sam grumbled sulkily. He’d been pouting for_ hours._ He’d barely gotten past being pissed about the Garth thing when Ash and Charlie had arrived in-game and, despite Charlie having _also_ made what Dean called the “monumentally stupid” decision to entrap herself in Moondoor, Dean had been all concerned and caring about _her._

He certainly hadn’t set a slobbering, overfamiliar, werewolf on her ass.

“I worked on Asmodeus’s avatar too,” she continued, “so I’m sure I’d recognize him if I met him in-game. And I have a good idea of what Magnus looks like too, since he’s apparently still using his original avatar, but I don’t think that’s going to be particularly helpful.”

“Why not?” Dean frowned, totally ignoring Sam’s resting bitch face and listening intently to Charlie instead.

“Because when I checked the accounts before logging out of the RRE server, I noticed that Lilith and Magnus were both down to only 2 lives each. Seems they’ve been duking it out with each other all week over near Ravensclaw, only Lilith pulled a fast one a couple of days ago and posted a financial reward online if someone would buy her a realm port and let her into their guild long enough to receive it. Then she ported away from Magnus, but not before posting his current cords on a public forum.”

“Well, that’s only going to be a problem if any of the other Knights read that post before getting trapped in the game. Odds are low any of them picked up on the significance of his co-ordinates anyway,” Ash considered.

“Whilst that would normally be a fair guess, not so much. Abaddon has a personal beef with Magnus. They’re real-life foes. I’ll spare you the sordid details. But I know she had an alert set up to record any mention of him in the game forums. I virtually guarantee the moment she realized her own single life this morning was due to a system-wide reset, rather than a personal glitch, she headed straight to Ravensclaw. She was based in Maregla, which was only a two-hour ride away. So I reckon there’s already a Rank 2 boss in Moondoor based on _that _fight and my money’s on Abaddon being the winner since she’s got a brand new avatar herself, so Magnus wouldn’t have seen her coming.”

“Do you have any idea of the identity of their Angels?” Castiel enquired, his eyes dark with sorrow at the thought that one of his brethren had lost their lives that morning.

Charlie shook her head apologetically. “No, sorry, none of that information was in their profiles. On a positive note, I do know exactly where Lilith ported to. Bargu. So I think we should head there this afternoon before she moves on.”

“I don’t think I’m comfortable with the idea of fighting a little girl,” Dean admitted sheepishly.

“She’s no more _really _a little girl than Sam is _really _a cat,” Charlie pointed out.

“Hmmmm,” Dean said, with a pointed glance at his brother who was now sitting with one leg waving high in the air whilst he was busy unashamedly licking his inner nether regions. “Hate to break it to you, Charlie, but my brother isn’t _usually _in the habit of giving himself public blow jobs.”

“Gabriel is,” Loki snickered. “Or at least he would be if he was normally that flexible.”

Charlie did a double-take, then rolled her eyes and huffed at Dean, “He’s just grooming himself. It’s a cat thing.”

“Exactly my point,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, with a frown. Then she gathered her composure. “Not really the same thing. Well, I guess you _do_ have a point but it’s still just instinctive behavioral camouflage. Like Lilith would find it easy to blend into a group of real children because it would feel totally natural to her to play hopscotch or tea party, but that wouldn’t prevent her from simultaneously plotting to slip arsenic into her teapot. Her actual _mind_ is that of a bitter and twisted adult woman and I absolutely guarantee she wouldn’t hesitate to offer you a hug and then stab you in the heart.”

“Even so, the idea of plotting to murder her just doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this,” he admitted honestly.

“The fate of this whole world depends on it,” Castiel reminded him.

Dean looked mulish. “Does it? Because I’ve been thinking about this. A lot. I don’t really need to kill _anyone_ to win this thing, especially since Amara is apparently happy to just bow out of Moondoor once Cain is dealt with. All we really need to do is stop _Cain_ killing anyone.”

“Well, yes, I guess so,” Ash agreed reluctantly. “Only how are you going to do that if you stay level 15?”

Dean sniffed his offense. “I’m _almost _level 50. My XP bar is at 78%. Stupid game rules are just preventing me from showing that experience on my public profile until I actually hit 100% and level up.”

“I hate to tell you this, but the mutual fight-fest between Lilith and Magnus means they’re both already level 70,” Charlie said. “And although I didn’t manage to check the scorecards of _all_ the Knights before I ran out of time, I know Nick is at 60, Azazel is at 50 and Crowley is at _80._”

“I would have expected ‘Nick’ to have registered as level 250 already,” Castiel said, with a frown of confusion. “Did Cain not merge with him immediately? I cannot perceive of any reason he would have hesitated to take control. He has displayed no previous hesitation in causing harm to humans.”

Charlie shrugged. “Dunno what to tell you. I definitely expected Cain to just jump on board and shunt Nick out of the picture completely but as of 11.15 last night when I checked, Nick’s scoreboard was still just level 60 and I have no idea where he is. He wasn’t registering as logged on at all.”

Sam paused his grooming and looked up with his eyes narrowed into slits. “Hang on. You’re basically saying Dean already doesn’t have a chance in hell against any of them because they’re _all_ more than big enough to kick his ass already.”

“Well, one-on-one, the strength disparity was always going to be skewed in favor of his opponents,” Ash agreed. “Because Chuck set Dean up to deliberately avoid gaining Soul Points. The other knights have been running around causing havoc and mayhem, building up their SP, so of course they have leveled up a lot faster than he has.”

“How about you _pretend_ I know fuck all about gaming and break it down for me in _English,_ Ash,” Sam hissed, his tail starting a slow, thudding, tempo against the floor.

“Do you know what a War Party is?” Ash asked.

“Not in this context.”

“Moondoor is set up primarily as a single-player roleplaying game, where even players in the same Guild still can only share basic resources with each other and all co-operation between players is totally based on Guild rules rather than game parameters. But the game engine also allows for intensive co-op play,” Ash said then, as Sam’s tail thrashed with obvious irritation, he explained, “That means ‘co-operative play’ but as a parameter, rather than an individual choice. But I’m not talking about normal multiplayer co-op, since the nature of the VR experience is that everyone is necessarily experiencing their own individual perception of the world. A linked-display kind of solution isn’t appropriate in a VR setting.”

“Nope, still got nothing,” Sam said.

“I am somewhat confused also,” Castiel admitted politely. “I do not believe your explanation to be particularly helpful, Ashriel.”

“Yeah, cut the clever crap, Ash,” Dean agreed. “Basically, what Ash is _trying _to say is that we can all join together as a team, pool our power levels and resources and our Leader gets to play at a much higher level than alone. The payoff for the team is we _all_ get an element of XP rewarded regardless of who actually strikes the killing blow.”

Sam tapped the table with his claws in a slow rhythm as he considered the idea. “So what’s the problem? Between the five of us we have 530 levels.”

“Damn,” Dean whistled. “I’d forgotten your original avatar was level 56,” he told Charlie, “and the shock of you turning up at all, let alone as ‘The Queen of Moondoor’, meant I didn’t really pay attention to the fact you’d just jumped 28 levels in power.”

“Well, it’ll help, a bit, though I think the Reaper gave it back to me to help me with the Amara situation rather than to add anything extra to our War Party.”

Dean nodded. “Sounds about right. But still, that’s an extra 2 levels for me right now, so still cool.”

“Why only 2?” Sam asked.

“Because the overall power of a War Party depends on the level of the Leader,” Ash explained. “And our Leader _has _to be Dean. At level 15, Dean can only accept 10% power level donations from his team. Rounded down, unfortunately. So if we form a War Party with him, our combined 515 levels gives him 51 levels of additional power, making _him_ level 66 in combat. Which is close enough to Lilith’s 70 that the difference should be negated by his skill as a fighter. Plus, we all still maintain 90% of our own power levels to use in solo fighting. Pretty cool, huh?”

“So without _me,_” Sam pointed out, “you’d only be level 47,” he pointed out to Dean, with a Cheshire Cat grin.

“Without _you_, I’d be level 82,” Dean countered darkly.

“Huh?”

“Yup,” Charlie agreed. “Ash and I had originally intended to let Dean kill us both a couple of times yesterday to level him up to 50. But then I got busy and when Bobby told me you were coming in-game with Gabriel, I told Ash not to bother going through with it himself. It would have worked, but that shit _hurts_.”

“It would also have caused Dean to gather a large amount of SP,” Castiel added significantly.

“I thought the SP/FP shit wasn’t a thing anymore,” Dean said, with a frown.

“Theoretically, it is no longer relevant,” Castiel allowed. “I, however, suspect that it may yet prove pertinent to the overall situation.”

“I’m with Cas,” Charlie agreed. “Nothing seems straightforward about any of this. Let’s keep our options open. Don’t close the FP door until the horse has bolted. In fact, until it has bolted _and_ been caught, shot, cooked and devoured.”

“That was a horrible analogy. I feel sick now,” Sam whimpered. “I’m an ethical vegetarian,” he added plaintively, his eyes flaring huge with liquid woe. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, looking immediately horrified and near tears herself. It was the first time she had witnessed the Sabriel Eyes, so hadn’t yet developed even a modicum of resistance to them. “I, um, didn’t mean to make you feel ill.”

Sam made a sad, pathetic, retching noise and his sides heaved as though he might vomit a hairball.

“Oh, oh, oh,” Charlie gasped, feeling totally wretched. “What can I do? How can I help?”

Sam muttered something plaintive in a low, broken voice.

Charlie dropped down to her knees to hear him better, then gasped her understanding. “Of course. Right away,” she said, jumping to her feet and racing towards the bar.

“You are NOT vegetarian,” Castiel announced, his brows furrowed with disapproval. “You stole the entirety of my bacon this morning.”

“I didn’t _steal _it,” Sam replied, sitting back up in an upright position. “You _gave _it to me.” He ignored Castiel’s smitey face and instead grinned happily as Charlie, the Queen of Moondoor, hurried back to the table, running as fast as she could without spilling the bowl of cream she’d just purchased from Ellen.

Dean watched incredulously, as Sam made a huge performance of delicately licking the cream into his mouth with obvious satisfaction, then he smirked to himself. “Still got game,” he said, with reluctant approval of Sam’s tactics. It seemed, cat instincts or not, Sam was _definitely_ still his cunning younger brother. That definitely made him more hopeful Sam would make it out of Moondoor in one piece.

Charlie, watching the interaction, narrowed her own eyes suspiciously. “I just got played, didn’t I?” she asked no-one in particular.

“Like a violin,” Ash agreed.

She frowned at the unrepentant Sam. “I’ve got just two words for you,” she said. “Lactose intolerance.”

Sam just stared at her with sphinx-like disdain.

“I’ve got an idea,” Dean said, breaking their staring contest (which Charlie was definitely losing). “A way to save the other Knights _and_ their Angels. It’s probably fair to suppose Lilith doesn’t know about the death thing, right?”

“She definitely knows she only has one game life left,” Charlie said. “She will have had that alert the moment she logged in. I doubt she knows yet that she can’t log _out._”

“Yeah, yeah, but does she know that dying in-game will more than probably kill her in real life too?” he challenged.

“Ooooh,” Charlie said. “Probably not. Can’t see how _any_ of the Knights other than you and Cain know about that.”

“So they’ll probably be a hell of a less gung ho about fighting to the death when they _do_ know, wouldn’t you think?”

“It would be highly likely to encourage them to at least consider other options,” Castiel agreed.

“So, help me out with the numbers here. If I managed to convince them all to join my War Party, instead of fighting me, I’d end up with, um… level 146, right?”

“Assuming you got _all_ of them to agree and also that Cain wouldn’t manage to kill any of them first,” Ash said, “And that would still leave you 104 levels lower than Cain. Even if you hit Level 50 soon enough, which is looking hopeful now, you’d only be level 181.”

“Nope,” Charlie said. “At level 50 he’d be able to call on 15% of the War Party. So that’s 50 plus… um…”

“50 plus 196, assuming no one else levels up,” Sam cut in. “So 246. Hardly short of Cain’s 250. But today you can only do 66. Unless… um…”

“Unless I let myself get seeded,” Dean finished for him. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Quite apart from the obvious, who knows what kind of asshole I’ll end up with in my head?”

“Gabriel’s an ArchAngel. He says he could put Castiel into you, and Loki into Castiel’s body, just temporarily. Just until we sort this crap out. That would give you an extra 191. No, wait, an extra 163, since you’d lose Castiel from the War Party, but still, you’d be level 238. So even if you did it right now, you’d be level 238 and that’s surely not impossible odds against a level 250.”

Dean thought about that. “Tell the truth, as much as the idea makes my stomach curdle, if there was a way to go and confront Cain right this moment, I’d take the chance and do it because I couldn’t stand the guilt of knowing every single person who dies in-game from this point would be on my head. But,” he continued, “we have no idea whatsoever where he is, do we? And if he manages to get to even one other Knight first he’ll immediately jump another 100 levels to 350.”

“So we backburner the idea,” Charlie said. “I’m pretty damned certain every single one of the Knights is going to be arrogant enough to believe they’ll win any confrontation anyway, so they won’t accept your offer. Still, it’s important, I think, that you’re going to make it to them.”

“Why, if you think it’s pointless?” Dean asked, confused rather than challenging.

It was Sam who answered, “Because regardless of the outcome, this totally removes any suggestion of ‘murder’. You remain Dean the ‘Righteous’, doesn’t he, Castiel?”

“Indeed,” Castiel agreed approvingly.

“I don’t get it,” Dean admitted.

“Murder is unlawfully killing with malice aforethought,” Sam explained simply. “You need premeditation. A conscious choice to disregard the value of another person’s life. That’s hardly a charge that will ever stick to _you_, Dean,” he pointed out fondly. “If you end up killing anyone, it’s definitely not going to be because you’ve _chosen_ to do it. It’s going to be either self-defense or necessary to save one of us. It will be _righteous._”

“Hope you’re right, fuzzy britches, since you’re my damned lawyer,” Dean muttered gruffly, then turned away to conceal a suspicious glistening in his eyes.

“So, we’re all going to Bargu, right?” Ash said, starting to purposefully gather his maps and scrolls.

“Makes sense,” Charlie agreed, “since our only other option is Ravensclaw at the moment and I’m pretty sure either Magnus or Abaddon are already now at level 200. Let’s leave the Rank 2 boss alone until we’re a bit stronger, one way or the other.”

"Why level 200?" Dean queried.

"Oh, because the act of actually ranking up to Rank Two, by killing another Knight permanently, would win you so much XP it would automatically up your Rank One status to a full 100%, then you add the 100 levels of the other knight and, voila, player level 200 at Boss rank 2."

"Damn," Ash whistled. "So it doesn't really matter what level any of the current Knights have reached already. They 'll even up identically when they rank up. So it's a level playing field. Well, for everyone except Cain. And maybe, Dean, since he's probably the only one with a moral compass so it looks like he'll struggle to rank up _at all_."

Dean looked at him sharply, but there was fondness rather than criticism on Ash's expression.

“Okay let's do this. But Sam’s staying here,” Dean said firmly. “He can be included in the War Party without actually coming with us, can't he?”

"He can," Charlie agreed.

“And that’s a big fat no,” Sam snorted. “Sure you can use my 19 levels remotely, but what about the rest of me? I’ll still be a level 172 fighter at your back. You'll probably need all the help you can get.”

“That you talking or Gabriel?” Dean demanded. “Yeah, thought so. Until it’s _him_ answering me in a situation like this, you’re just a level one furball. Less of a _help_ and definitely more of a _liability_. So take a chill pill. It’s Ferris Mewler’s day off.”

“I can’t believe you said that,” Sam groaned.

“I’m more surprised you caught the reference. But it’s settled. Kitty stays here."

Sam opened his mouth to speak but, "Don't want to hear it," Dean added obstinately.

“Does this _look_ like a cattery?” Ellen demanded, as she appeared seemingly from nowhere to collect the empty cream bowl. “You’re not leaving him here _alone._ Do you have any idea what entire Tomcats do around a place when they start to feel at home? Besides, I have enough shit on my plate without being responsible for your brother’s safety, Dean.”

Behind Dean’s back, she offered Sam a supportive wink.

"I'm not staying behind," Charlie stated firmly.

"Nor me," Ash added.

Castiel just gave Dean the same look he'd offered Sam over the bacon fiasco.

Sam smirked. “I’m a twenty-four-year-old adult,” he pointed out. “I’m fully capable of making my own choices.”

“You’re a _cat,_” Dean snarled.

“So, I’m small and inconspicuous,” Sam argued.

“You’re a cat wearing a hat and boots,” Dean scoffed. “What the fuck is inconspicuous about _that?”_

“That’s your objection?” Sam spluttered. “Fine. Have it your way.” Furiously, he swiped the hat off his head, then sat on his ass and tried pulling his boots off. His paws weren’t terribly helpful. After a moment of watching and rolling her eyes, Ellen knelt down and helped.

“NOOOO,” Dean yelped, covering his eyes and jumping backward. “You can’t walk around _naked.”_

“He’s covered in fur,” Charlie pointed out. “And it’s not like his boots were covering anything… um… significant.”

“It’s the principle,” Dean muttered mulishly. “And you’re still not coming,” he added, in Sam’s direction.

“I’m either coming with you, or going there on my own,” Sam told him firmly. “Ash has already given me a supply of realm ports. They can’t be _that_ hard to use.”

“Really?” Dean said, his eyes shooting daggers at his _former_ best friend.

Ash shrugged. “Didn’t think,” he said innocently. “Was just trying to be proactive.”

“I’ll proactive _you_,” Dean grunted, but it was clear from the dejected slump of his shoulders he had finally given in to the inevitable.

…

“Well, that’s different,” Dean said, as they approached the town walls and saw a thin line of somewhat ragtag guardsmen defending the entrance.

He counted a couple of dozen low-level NPC characters, primarily levels four and five, save for their Sergeant who was a relatively respectable level ten. Their uniforms were varying shades of off-grey, the variance one suggestive of age and excessive wash cycles rather than design. Whoever had cobbled together this motley crew of defenders had been working on a tight budget, it appeared.

“Want me to cast a sleeping spell on them?” Ash asked Charlie casually. For a Mage of his level, the guards were more of an irritation than a threat.

“Nah, let’s see if we can do this the old-fashioned way. Don’t want to rile up the natives if we can sweet-talk our way in. Besides, we don’t want to set off any possible alert spells by using magic too soon. Let’s not give Lilith a chance to slip the net,” she replied.

“Odd to see active defenses like this though,” Dean muttered. “Is Bargu involved in any Guild Wars?”

Charlie shook her head, equally bemused. “It’s an NPC town. It gets an influx of ‘immigrants’ twice-yearly when it hosts a couple of system events, but to the best of my knowledge doesn’t have any Guild affiliations whatsoever. If they _are_ at war, it must be some local dispute.”

“The guards appear to be a motley crew,” Castiel announced. “Their Ill-fitting and much-aged uniforms suggest this defensive guard has been assembled with some haste. It is most likely that Lilith’s arrival is the source of their recent employ.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed with Castiel’s assessment. Most of the guards looked like they would be more comfortable holding hoes than spears, and Dean had little doubt they were more usually employed as field hands rather than town guardsmen. That wasn’t necessarily a positive thing. Soldiers were orderly and disciplined. Characters _playing_ soldiers were all too likely to descend into a baying rabble if provoked into fear.

The only one of the assembled guards who bore any resemblance to a true soldier was the ancient-looking level ten character wearing the Sergeant insignia. Dean had a distinct feeling the old man usually stood guard duty alone. He certainly appeared to be almost as wary of the behavior of his own men as he was of the approaching War Party, since he was constantly checking over his shoulder to check ‘his’ men were keeping their designated positions.

His concern appeared well placed since, the moment he took a step forward to plant his spear in the ground in a warning for their party to halt, his own men broke ranks and swarmed to huddle behind him like a flash mob.

Rolling his eyes with irritation, the Sergeant nonetheless spoke with clear authority as he announced, “Halt, strangers. You shall not pass into the City of Bargu.”

“Well, that’s just _rude,” _Dean stated. “You could at least ask us who we are and what we want before giving us the bum’s rush.”

The Sergeant’s face twitched, either with irritation or shame, but he crossed his arms firmly to emphasize his position was not negotiable.

“The City of Bargu is closed to all immigrants at this time. Your identity and purpose is, therefore, irrelevant.”

“Rude _and _racist,” Dean pointed out.

The Sergeant flushed and shuffled a little uncomfortably, but he didn’t back down.

“Sleeping spell,” Ash muttered quietly.

Dean opened his mouth to agree but Charlie took that moment to step forward and address the Sergeant directly.

“Who are you to deny us access?” she demanded imperially. “Don’t you know who I am? I am your Queen, Charlene of Moondoor.”

The Sergeant startled, his eyes widening in belated recognition and, for a moment, that appeared to have resolved the matter since, with a slight bow, he reached to retrieve his spear from her path.

But then the rabble behind him began to mutter in protest.

“Former queen,” one of the guardsmen challenged, and his defiant statement was repeated in a chant by several of the others.

The Sergeant sent them a warning glower over his shoulder but, although he addressed Charlie with apologetic deference in his voice, their comments had clearly changed his mind once more. “Forgive us, your majesty, but it is well known that you chose to abdicate your throne, then you fled the Kingdom and left us to face the Dark Queen alone.”

“Really?” She demanded, without missing a beat. “Do I _look_ like I’ve fled the kingdom?”

That gave him pause. He frowned at her uncertainly. Sensing a chink in his armor, she pressed ahead. “I was betrayed by my most trusted advisors,” she announced. “It was necessary for me to make a _temporary_ strategic retreat but only so I could amass faithful followers before retaking my throne.”

“Faithful followers?” A guard scoffed. “And these denizens of evil are the best you could come up with?”

“Who you calling a denizen of evil?” Dean snarled, taking a threatening step forward.

“Not _you,” _the guard assured him hastily, as he belatedly realized Dean was several inches taller and a lot more heavily muscled. “I was referring to the witch, of course.”

“What witch?”

“The Elvish Witch,” the Sergeant clarified on his man’s behalf, with a dark frown of suspicion towards Ash.

Ash stepped to Dean’s side and every single one of the guards startled and grabbed the pommels of their short swords. “I am not a _witch_,” he enunciated clearly. “I am a Mage. My magic is sourced from the light, not born of darkness.”

“Then why ain’t ya in the Mage Guild?” Someone muttered.

“Mages don’t have familiars. Only witches have familiars,” another called out.

Sam opened his mouth to protest but Dean kneed him sharply in the ribs. “For god’s sake don’t _speak_ or we’ll all end up burned on a stake.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Charlie snapped. “This is my Mage Ashriel, my handmaiden Dean and my perfectly _ordinary _pet cat, Sabriel.”

While Dean spluttered about being designated a ‘handmaiden’, Sam reluctantly gave in to Gabriel’s urging and let rip a loud, definitely cat-like _Miaow_.

“See,” she said, “just a cat.”

The Sergeant harrumphed and relaxed slightly. “But what about your right-hand man? He does not appear to be a warrior, yet his power level is beyond belief. Is he, perhaps, a scholar or a priest?”

“This is the Lord Castiel, High Priest of Chuck,” Charlie lied shamelessly. “He is a very _powerful _Priest. You _must_ have heard of him, even in such a backwater as this is.”

“Of course we have,” the Sergeant lied, unwilling to say no and prove Bargu _was_ a backwater. “His power and authority are legendary.”

“He will, perhaps, bless your temple in exchange for your hospitality towards me, his charge,” Charlie offered airily.

“Um… we don’t, um, actually have a temple. We only have a shrine,” the Sergeant admitted, a little defensively.

“Then Bargu is, by definition, not a _City_,” Castiel announced coldly, in a voice resonant with power. “Come, your highness. We have arrived at this place under false pretenses. It is not the important _City_ we were led to believe. It is merely a town with an overgrown ego. This is not a suitable place to leave your treasure for safekeeping, after all.”

“Treasure?” Several of the nearest guards repeated, their eyes lighting up with obvious greed.

Dean blinked in disbelief at Castiel. Talk about picking up the baton and running with it. He needed to stop expecting Castiel to react like Jimmy. Whilst both were naïve in many respects, Castiel seemed to have a natural aptitude for handling dangerous situations well. Which probably made sense, given he’d been programmed to be a _warrior _angel.

He also, interestingly, appeared a _lot_ more comfortable with the idea of _lying._

“It’s an exceedingly _large_ shrine,” the Sergeant assured Charlie hurriedly. “Definitely _almost_ a temple.”

“I am weary from traveling and dusty from the road,” Charlie said to Castiel. “Perhaps we could at least enter and visit this _exceedingly large_ shrine before making a decision one way or the other?”

“As your majesty desires,” he conceded, with a frown of deliberate reluctance.

“Thank you, Lord Castiel. You are kind to indulge me in such a fashion,” Charlie turned to the Sergeant. “Perhaps you would escort us to suitable lodgings.”

“Of course, your Majesty. If you would allow me to…”

“What about the Princess?” A guard interrupted rudely. “She told us _powerful_ people were going to come here to kill her, didn’t she? Well, you don’t get more powerful than _him,” _he said, gesturing towards Castiel.

“What Princess?” Charlie queried.

“Your cousin, Princess Lilith. We have promised to guard her with our lives,” the Sergeant said proudly, and his men attempted to stand to attention in emphasis of his words, although the pushing and shoving between them as they attempted to arrange themselves back into a row was less than impressive.

“Very clever of her to request assistance from such obviously dedicated protectors,” Charlie said, her expression sweet even though she was seething inside at the nerve of the Knight to claim false kinship with her.

Puffed with pride from the compliment, the Sergeant preened yet said, “Although my man was unforgivably blunt, he did have a point. You may well be those the Princess spoke of who wish her harm. Shapeshifters are not unknown in these parts. I would be lax in my duties were I simply to take your appearance as proof of your good nature.”

“Does your _City_ have a soothsayer, or is that _also _something it lacks?” Castiel demanded, with a precise snarkiness that made Dean choke back a snort of laughter.

“We have a most holy wise woman, Pamela of the Barns. She is versed both in divination and the reading of souls.”

“Then bring her forward that we might prove we mean the Princess no harm,” Castiel insisted.

After several minutes a tall, attractive brunette in a long white robe emerged from the gates. Although she was an NPC like the guards, her character was level 18, indicating she was a considerably more complex character than any of the guardsmen.

She scoffed loudly when the Sergeant explained the reason she’d been summoned to the gate.

“I refuse to read the _Queen_ of Moondoor. I do not wish to be hanged at a later date for any perceived affront to her person. I do not have the skill to read a level 81 Mage and I am too terrified to even approach the Priest. I didn’t even know such power could be contained within a single vessel. Just attempting to read him would likely burn the very eyes out of my head,” she told the Sergeant bluntly.

“Well that leaves you either the handmaiden or the cat,” the man sniffed rudely.

The woman turned to consider Dean, a smirk flickering around her mouth. “With your leave?” She asked Dean, reaching towards him.

Dean looked towards his companions in a panic but Charlie, Ash and Castiel all looked perfectly relaxed, so he shrugged and let Pamela take his hands in her own.

He tried not to flinch as she ran her fingers caressingly up his wrists, then ran them slowly over his arms, pausing to feel his biceps. Then she trailed her fingers all over his chest until she reached his neck, where she paused to knead slightly around his collar bones, before cupping his face in her slender fingers, regarding him solemnly and then, without warning, she suddenly leaned forward and kissed him.

With tongue.

Then, as he blinked in near-horrified shock, she let go of him and stepped back.

“Dean the Righteous has a pure heart. He has extreme concern for and, perhaps, fear _of_ the Princess, but there is not one single desire within him to bring lasting harm to her person,” she announced loudly, and all of the guards visibly relaxed.

“How did you tell?” Dean demanded, even as he understood why his companions had been relaxed about the idea of a soothsayer. Of all of them, he was the only one who had been likely to be ‘read’ _and_ the only one genuinely hoping Lilith would prove to be a reasonable person who could be persuaded to join them rather than fight them.

“I read your nature and intentions the moment I set eyes on you,” she replied, with a serene smile.

“So what was all the touching about?”

“You’re a very pretty man,” she told him unapologetically, as she fixed her eyes on his and then offered him a cheeky wink. “I live above the apothecary if you have any trouble sleeping tonight. I am sure I have the remedy for whatever might ail you.”

Then she turned and walked away, her skirts swishing with each cant of her deliberately swaying hips.

They were escorted inside the ‘City’ walls. It was a bustling, highly occupied settlement but it was increasingly evident from inside the walls that it was, truly, nothing more than a town with illusions of grandeur. Few of the buildings were stone-built and only two of those appeared to have any particular substance to them. They were led, a little apologetically, to the smaller of those two.

“If the Princess and her retinue were not already occupying the entirety of the main keep I would, of course, escort you there instead,” the Sergeant told them, indicating the larger stone building with a flick of his wrist. “This, however, is the personal dwelling of Lord Cialc. He is away from the City on a trading mission but is due to return in the next few days. I am certain he would be pleased, nay _honored, _that you use his accommodations in his absence.”

“I know Lord Cialc well,” Charlie lied smoothly. “I will be most delighted to await his return. Perhaps I will wait for that reunion before requesting an audience with my Cousin Lilith. It would be good manners to allow _him_ to make the introductions.”

At her suggestion of delaying her meeting with Lilith, any remaining nervousness fled the Sergeant completely. After Charlie assured him her ‘handmaiden’ would be perfectly able to handle the securing and comfort of their lodging, the man announced his intention to return to the gates to keep watch for the _enemies_ of Princess Lilith, and departed.

“Phew,” Dean breathed. “Next time, let’s port directly _inside_ the gates of our destination, huh?”

Ash nodded his fervent agreement.

“Sorry guys. I honestly thought it would be easier to arrive outside and walk-in rather than take the risk of accidentally landing right on top of someone. It never occurred to me we’d get the third degree from NPC gate Gestapo,” Charlie said.

“That was pretty hairy. Who knew NPC’s had such sticks up their asses? You were great though, Charlie and, jeez, Cas, I didn’t think you had it in you. That was a pretty bad-ass performance,” Dean enthused.

“Was it?” Castiel replied. “My role was minor, compared to yours. After all, I was not required to take part in sexual congress in public.”

“She kissed _me,” _Dean protested. “It wasn’t _my_ idea.”

“Didn’t see you complaining,” Charlie muttered.

“I was being polite. I had no idea she was going to do that. She just jumped me.”

“Because you are such a ‘pretty man’,” Castiel agreed dryly.

Dean flushed uncomfortably. “Watch out, Cas. Someone might think you were jealous,” he joked weakly.

Castiel turned his nose up and sniffed. “I have no reason for jealousy. I have been told that I _also_ am a very pretty man.”

“What?” Dean spluttered. “That’s not what I meant. Hang on, who exactly told _you_ that?”

Charlie snorted in a very unladylike fashion.

“Um, did anyone else hear that guy say Lilith had a retinue?” Sam pointed out, eager to change the subject.

“I assume we’re talking demons,” Ash told him. “Can’t see how she could have acquired any other kind of followers.”

“Demons?”

“Damn,” Dean said. “What’s the odds it’s Meg again?”

“Extremely high, since she was apparently the only Demonic Lieutenant,” Castiel pointed out. “Though perhaps more demons have been promoted since our last encounter.”

“How’s your SP?” Ash asked.

“Righteously low,” Dean quipped, with a side glance at Castiel, “but more than enough to do a summoning.”

Ash grinned at Dean’s immediate understanding of his intention. 

“What’s going on?” Sam asked.

“Watch and learn,” Dean quipped, as he and Ash quickly drew a large inverted Devil’s trap for them all to stand inside. “But whatever you do, don’t step outside the sigil and DO NOT SPEAK, Sam. I mean it. This is not someone we can risk finding out who you are.”

Dean drew on his SP and Meg, the Demon, materialized outside of the trap.

“Not you again,” she cursed. “Don’t you assholes realize I’m _busy_? I’m already working a deal.”

“We know,” Dean said. “But I just paid for _this_ time, so tough shit.”

Meg sniffed rudely. “What the fuck, I was bored anyway,” she drawled, making a point of examining her nails disinterestedly.

“We know that _too,” _Dean said. “Since you’re just hanging around waiting for an attack that hasn’t happened… yet.”

“How do you know that? Where are we?” Meg demanded suspiciously.

“Oh, I’d say you just traveled about 300 feet, give or take,” Dean grinned.

“How the hell did you get inside Bargu? There’s supposed to be guards on the gate.”

“You know how it is. Can never get the staff,” Dean said.

“Tell me about it. Those NPC guys are morons,” Meg sighed. “Then again, so are most of the players. I thought this Knights of Hell gig was going to be cool but, except for Crowley, most of them are so up their own asses they don’t even see me as an actual _person._ It’s all do this, do that, like I’m some kind of trained monkey.”

“You’ve met the other Knights? All of them?”

“All of you,” she agreed. “And I gotta say if you’re going for the tortoise and the hare kinda outcome, you’re right on track. Still level 15? You’re a cute little Knight-lite, aren’t you? Like a kid playing dress-up. Awwww. No wonder Crowley calls you the Twink.”

“You’re having to work with _all_ of the Knights? That’s got to cause a few scheduling conflicts,” Dean pointed out, shrugging off her mockery. “You need to complain to your management. Start a union maybe.”

“I would, if Clarence here hadn’t taken out the head honcho himself,” Meg snapped. “The whole Hell protocol was _Chuck’s_ idea. Now he’s out of the picture, the whole place is falling apart.”

“Hell is disintegrating into the Empty?” Castiel inquired, his brow furrowed with concern.

“Damn. Is he always this literal?” Meg sighed, rolling her eyes.

“It’s an angel thing, I think,” Dean said, with a shrug.

“I meant the power structure has collapsed. Lots of infighting. Everyone wants to be Top Dog. Nothing is actually getting done. No one is getting promoted, in fear they might join the charge to the top, so I am _still_ the only damned Lieutenant.”

“That sucks,” Dean commiserated. “So spending lots of time in Purgatory, huh?”

“In and out like a yo-yo on crack,” she agreed resentfully. “Sometimes I think I’d rather stay there. It’s a shitty place but at least the Purgatory monsters are interesting. But, no, some asshole like you always casts a spell and yanks me back out to babysit whatever demonic host they’ve summoned and then I’m stuck hanging around like a bad smell until they either run out of Soul Points or someone takes me out.”

“So how much SP _does_ Lilith have left to spend?” Charlie asked. “Because I assume you guys are on a rent-by-the-hour kind of deal, huh? I’d hate to go to the effort of doing you the favor of sending you all to Purgatory this afternoon if you were planning to clear out at sunset, or something, anyway.”

“Like to see you try,” Meg began, only to break off and pale as Castiel cleared his throat. “Ah, Clarence. Forgot you were here. So, um, what’s the deal, guys?”

“Depends,” Dean said, thoughtfully. “I _was_ planning on Cas here simply smiting you, before we go and take out your minions since they’d be left in chaos by your absense. But now I’m thinking about a different _longer-term _solution.”

“You, brother, are out of your mind,” Ash laughed, proving yet again that he could read Dean like a book.

“Am I?” Dean asked. “There’s a shed load of demons but only ONE lieutenant. Take _her_ out of the picture and, sure, the Knights can keep on summoning demons but Demons would no longer be tools to be used, they’d be an eruption of random chaos and the nature of Chaos is its effects are completely _neutral.”_

“Oh, I get _that_ bit,” Ash said. “It’s your solution that’s pretty insane. Just sayin’.”

“She’s a monster. Just like Benny and Garth. She isn’t _evil._ She’s just following her programming, or trying to, and it’s not her fault the whole game was set up to make her play a ‘bad guy’,” Dean argued. “Meg didn’t ask for this shit anymore than we did. Castiel made the decision to stop being Chuck’s puppet. Maybe, given the opportunity, Meg will accept the same choice. After all, she _has_ to know that Cain winning would guarantee the destruction of Moondoor entirely. When the human authorities discover this ‘game’ has been responsible for countless deaths, they will move to destroy the program completely and Cain no longer has any way to return to our world to run damage interference at RRE. So all Meg is achieving is hastening her _own_ destruction. She’s a smart enough cookie to want to avoid _that_ outcome,” Dean said, then hoped his little data dump of hard reality would make the Demon reconsider her own position.

Meg laughed bitterly. “Like you said, kiddo, I’m a _monster, _not an Angel. I can’t prevent myself from getting summoned so even if I am sick to the back teeth of this totally pointless crap, and now Chuck has been taken out it evidently IS totally pointless, there’s fuck all I can do about it.”

“Maybe not,” Dean replied. “Cas, what’s the actual precise summoning protocol? Do you know? I mean _where_ exactly can they be summoned from?”

“I know,” Charlie interrupted. “That’s _my _bag. A knight can use SP to summon a demon from Hell, Moondoor or Purgatory. So, basically, anywhere.”

“Anywhere?” Dean repeated. “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“Huh. It’s definitely ‘inconceivable’ you’d quote _that_ movie to me,” Charlie laughed, “but I’m not following you.”

“Where does a player’s inventory physically exist?” he asked.

Charlie blinked at him a moment, then said, “Ooooohhhh. Inside their _Avatar._ Of course. So not in Moondoor at all. But how did _you_ figure that out? Most players believe their avatars _must_ physically exist in this world since they _use_ them here.”

Dean chuckled. “Yeah, I missed it for a long time,” he admitted. “But I started thinking about how could dying in-game _really _cause the death of a player? Which took me to the way V.I.s apparently have to embed themselves into a player’s actual physical brain-stem and the whole Jimmy getting healed stuff and the more I thought about it, the more it only made sense if the primary meshing of V.I. and Host happened _inside_ the gubbins of the actual immersion tank. So the avatars we play in aren’t really _here_ at all, are they? We are in, well, I guess, a kind of holographic projection of our avatars, sent from the tanks into Moondoor. And it doesn’t make any difference, 99.9% of the time. It only gets really relevant in the Gen 9 tanks that have the coding compatible with Angels like Cas.”

Charlie smiled and nodded. “You’re smart,” she said. “Really, _surprisingly_ smart. Guess your mom’s apples didn’t fall far from the tree after all. Though using words like ‘gubbins’ is half the reason people underestimate you, you know?”

Dean just smirked.

“Um, bored here…” Meg reminded them, with a dramatic roll of her eyes.

“Oh, I think you’ll be interested in the next bit,” Charlie said, with a wink. “The ‘twink’ here has just found you one hell of a loophole.”


	69. Lilith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is the chapter that earns the long-standing tag warning of Graphic Violence. It's pretty brutal in places.  
As for the ending, again, well, refer to the tags before screaming at me....
> 
> .... slopes off to hide.

“So, um, isn’t it about time you did your thing?” Sam asked Gabriel, as they all prepared to approach the Keep. “It’s been almost a day and I know you said it might take a couple of days for you to be able to take control but you claimed it would only take a ‘few hours’ before you could lend me your strength.”

“Yeah, well I had no idea how dense you were,” Gabriel complained.

“You’re saying I’m too stupid to be seeded?” Sam demanded, blinking in astonishment. He didn’t like to brag but he knew damned well he was practically a genuine ‘genius’. 

“You’re too _dense,”_ Gabriel repeated. “Impenetrable. Solid. Compacted,” he clarified. “Look, although it’s a myth that people only use 90% of their brain, there’s a _kind_ of truth to it too. Most people habitually use only _certain _parts of their brain, and it’s relatively easy to find pathways between the heavily utilized areas. _Your _brain is more like the house of a hoarder. I feel like I’m trying to squeeze past ceiling-high stacks of old newspapers. Do you even _know_ what shit you’re storing in here?”

Sam shrugged apologetically. “I guess it’s the memory thing. All those audio files must be getting stored _somewhere._”

“Which wouldn’t even matter if you just left them to gather dust but, no, you’re always creeping around the stacks, rifling through them, keeping those areas active instead of archiving them away like a _normal_ person. So, bottom line, I’m still fighting my way through your junk. Starting to see the odd chink of light though. Couple more hours and I _might_ manage to send a tendril or two out. Might not. It’s like a maze in here. I keep thinking I’ve found an exit and then I hit a brick wall and have to backtrack again,” Gabriel grumbled.

Sam thought about that, then shrugged. “Well, thanks I guess, because I don’t doubt it would be easier for you to just punch on through and knock those walls down.”

“Yeah but then I’d have to take over, since you’d be a drooling idiot, and as much as I’d like to get my hands on your buns I wasn’t envisaging it as a masturbatory exercise.”

“Wrong brother. I’m not gay,” Sam pointed out.

“I’m not _male_,” Gabriel retorted. “I’m a virtual intelligence.”

“Okay, then, I’m not OS, either.”

“That hurts. Objectum Sexuals are attracted to inanimate objects. I don’t identify as a sex doll. Though, come to think of it, it might not be a bad life-choice.”

“That’s okay. These days it’s politically correct to self-identify as anything you like,” Sam chuckled. “But I’m still not interested.”

“Fine,” Gabriel said airily. “Play hard to get. That’s more fun anyway.”

…

Meg had told them Lilith had summoned 60 demons. None of them higher than rank 20. So, individually, none of them (except Sam) were in any danger of losing a skirmish.

Since the demons were more likely to attack in groups, though, dealing with them wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

At least it wouldn’t have been without Ash and Castiel.

Lilith was apparently inside the central hall area of the Main Keep, sitting inside an inverted devil’s trap and therefore imprisoned in the center of her own web until the Demons were destroyed or she ran out of SP.

The latter, however, wouldn’t be any time soon. Lilith had apparently dispatched all of the Keep’s NPC servants and so was sitting on enough Soul Points to hold out for several days.

But all except a half-dozen demons were patrolling the walled courtyards that surrounded the main keep, ten in the inner courtyard and the majority in the outer so, now that Meg was firmly settled inside his inventory in the company of Garth and was no longer in place to direct the demonic host, Dean wasn’t anticipating _too_ much difficulty with Lilith herself. They were almost the same level, thanks to the War Party contribution, and he was not only a more skilled fighter but he had height, reach and mass on his side. Six low-level demons weren’t a particularly problematic addition to that calculation, particularly with a level fifteen vampire at his side.

So they had decided that Castiel and Ash would tackle the bulk of the demons in the outer courtyard, Ash freezing them with his magic as he located each patrolling group, so that Castiel could simply walk up and smite them one by one in an efficient noiseless manner. Charlie, Dean and Benny would deal with the inner courtyard demons, and when assured that _that_ situation was under control, Dean and Benny would head directly for Lilith, leaving Sam with Charlie in the cleared inner courtyard.

A plan which, naturally, fell apart the moment they made contact with the enemy since, without Meg there to keep her eye on them, some of the demons had left their assigned posts and had aimlessly wandered around, redistributing themselves in a less helpful manner.

There were still forty-four demons marching around the outer courtyard in packs of four or five, but all but two of the inner courtyard demons had returned back inside the Keep. They hadn’t even thought to close the door properly behind them, which was why Dean had been able to peer through the foot-wide gap and assess the number of foes inside.

Which was both good and bad news, in Dean’s book.

Having only two demons to deal with outside of the building meant it was fast and easy for them to despatch them and reach the front door of the Keep. What he wasn’t happy about was the idea of leaving Sam outside on his own whilst they entered and he wasn’t cocky enough to believe he and Benny could handle 14 demons _and _Lilith by themselves. As a level 56, Charlie was going to be a pretty crucial addition to that fight.

Leaving _Benny_ with Sam wasn’t an option either. As much as he respected Benny as a fighter, there was no way he was trusting his brother’s safety to a mere level 15, Monster or not.

“There’s no one here,” Sam pointed out.

“What if Cas and Ash miss any of their demons and they retreat into this yard?” Dean snapped.

“I can just jump up on a roof out of sight.”

Dean shook his head. “Probably. But what if it doesn’t work? I’ll be too busy worrying about you to concentrate on Lilith,” he admitted.

Sam ducked his head guiltily, realizing belatedly that Dean had probably been right to insist he stayed with Ellen until he was more useful (or at least less of a liability) in a fight. It was a shame he couldn’t just hop inside Dean’s inventory like Meg and Garth… and… “I’ve had an idea,” he said.

“No,” Dean replied shortly, after listening to the plan.

“Dunno, brother, it sounds pretty smart to me,” Benny replied.

“It does,” Charlie agreed. “Wasn’t the whole idea of getting Meg out of the picture the fact that chaos is a neutral scenario? And I can’t imagine anything causing more immediate, unexpected chaos. As long as he’s fast, and I saw him move like shit off a shovel this morning, he’ll be in and out faster than they can even react.”

“Poor Garth,” Benny said, but then shrugged. “Still, worst-case scenario is he gets killed. Might do him good to level up a bit. Might get smarter.”

“Hard for him _not_ to, all things considered,” Sam griped.

Dean scowled at his brother. “I can’t believe you’d even suggest this after the bitchfest you gave me this morning.”

“Let that be a lesson to you,” Sam replied slyly. “It was YOU who gave me the idea.”

“What if they _all_ charge out?” Dean demanded. “That’s the most probable scenario. Then Charlie and Benny are going to have 14 demons to deal with.”

“Piece of cake,” Charlie said. “You don’t think we can handle 14 between us?”

“Not saying that. But it’s going to take time and, during that time, Sam’s going to be vulnerable.”

“Good point,” she admitted.

Sam scowled. “Okay, then if they _all_ run out, I’ll follow _you_ in and you can shut the door. Then you can deal with Lilith without worrying about demons _or_ me. I promise I’ll go sit in a corner and stay out of the way.”

It took a little more persuasion but eventually, primarily because he couldn’t think of another option, Dean conceded.

Sam prowled right up to the open door and crouched down like a runner on the starter’s orders.

Dean opened his inventory and withdrew Garth.

Garth materialized in the courtyard, noticed Sam, let out an ecstatic howl of adoration and charged towards him with an ear-splitting wail of “Putttytaaaaat.”

Sam waited until Garth was within spitting distance, though he had to fight his instincts yelling at him to _run, run, run_, before leaping through the doorway into the hall.

He raced around the periphery of the room like a rocket, sliding like greased lightning as he wove through the legs of the milling demons, looping around behind the Devil’s Trap containing Lilith and charging back towards the front door.

And, all the while, the rabidly enthusiastic werewolf was hot on his heels, similarly ignoring the demonic host he was shoving and barrelling past in his relentless pursuit of the fleeing cat.

The whole thing took less than 22 seconds (Dean knew, because he was timing it) before a ginger cannonball erupted out of the front door, followed shortly by a disheveled werewolf and then, perhaps 10 seconds later, the entire fourteen of Lilith’s demonic ‘protectors’ charged out of the door in hot pursuit.

Whilst Benny and Charlie took the opportunity to stand on either side of the door to take out a couple of demons from behind, Dean reached down and snatched Sam clear off the ground, tucking him safely under his arm despite a snarl of protest, and then mentally reached out, grabbed Garth and threw him back into the safety of his inventory a moment before the first demons cornered him against the outer wall.

Then Dean entered the Hall, closed and bolted the door, carefully placed his brother on the floor to scuttle into the safety of the shadows, and then turned to face Lilith.

Who was, indeed, inhabiting the body of a little girl.

Dean had read books in which there were characters with ‘ancient’ eyes and he’d always assumed it was metaphor or poetic license. Now, though, he understood the phrase could be literal. Despite her sun-blonde hair, heart-shaped face and little girl body in its cutesy dress, Lilith’s cornflower blue eyes were the one thing that totally gave away the falsity of her otherwise innocent appearance.

They sparkled with a bright, knowing awareness that _no_ real child could exhibit.

And though her voice was high and sweet, her words removed any slight doubt to her true identity.

“The demons weren’t here to protect me against _you, _whoever you are,_”_ she mocked. “I don’t need them to deal with a sorry excuse of a Knight like you. You honestly think your pathetic level 15 stands a chance against my 70? Damn. You’re nothing more than a gnat. An irritation at best. Still, it’s been a long time since a newbie decided to commit suicide against me in a pathetic display of macho bullshit.”

Dean offered her a cocky grin. “Well, you have a point,” he said. “Or, at least, you _would_ have a point except, well, clearly you didn’t bother doing more than a surface scan of my profile. Why not try again?”

Lilith sneered but clearly did as he suggested because, abruptly, her eyes widened with both disbelief and fear. “That’s not possible. How the hell did you form a War Party?”

“If you don’t know how War Parties work, you’re clearly a newbie yourself,” he mocked.

She scowled at him. “You’re cheating,” she declared. “You’re having assistance from other players. You’re even in a Guild. I’ll report you. Get you kicked out of the game. You can’t _cheat_ your way to the First Blade.”

“Try it,” he drawled. “Clearly you haven’t noticed the Help system is offline. No tickets. No support. No PM’s. No nothing. Though you’d be a bit of a hypocrite to even try, considering you _bought_ external help yourself a couple of days ago.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said, and Dean winced at hearing the words spoken in her high, girlish voice.

Then she looked startled again.

“You’re right. My system interface isn’t offering me any external comms.”

“Why not try logging out?” he suggested.

She laughed. “I’m still more powerful than you. Do you think those four levels of difference don’t count? Think again. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Nope, I meant _try_ logging out. In fact, just try finding the log-out icon.”

She was quiet for a moment, but her expression changed from smug to alarmed and then to almost panicked. “What have you done?” she accused.

“Wasn’t me,” he said, and gave her a potted and much-censored history of what had been going on. “So, you see,” he said, when he finished, “This whole situation is a scam. The competition is bogus. The Generation 9 tanks are death-traps and the only way _any _of us are getting out of this alive is if we join together and stand against the _artificial intelligence_ who calls himself Cain. So join my War Party and we can fight together.”

She bit her lower lip in thought.

“Or,” she said, eventually, “I can just win the game myself.”

The sigil blazed to life on her arm as she activated it and drew her crude bone dagger.

“Let’s dance,” she said.

Almost immediately, Dean realized he was in trouble.

It wasn’t the four levels of difference between them that was the issue. He was a far more experienced fighter and his literal years of one-on-one combat inside the game probably equated to ten levels of _true _advancement over Lilith. It wasn’t even his refusal to activate his own sigil, despite the disadvantage he suffered since Lilith shared no such hesitation.

But she was a little girl.

As much as his mind told him it was just fakery, his instincts refused to listen, and so it was, indeed, more of a dance than a fight, with him ducking and diving savage thrusts of her dagger that were clearly intended to maim or kill, whilst his own assaults were all attempts to disarm and restrain.

Yet slowly, inevitably, he gradually gained the upper hand. His height and reach so much greater than hers that she couldn’t close in for a killing blow without entering the range of his own dagger.

And, it must be said, despite his own efforts to completely ignore his own sigil, the constant throbbing pulse of its power chipped relentlessly away at him, urging him to simply activate it so he could be done with this ‘nonsense’ altogether.

But he resisted its siren call, pushing and pressing his height advantage over the girl, until she could do nothing more than defend against him, until he had her backed against the far wall of the hall and she had nowhere else to retreat.

“I don’t want to die,” she sobbed, her pale blue eyes huge and terrified in her tiny heart-shaped face. Her hair was matted with sweat, clinging like rat tails down her tear-stained cheeks, its golden blonde so damp it was darkened to mousy brown.

“None of us wants to die,” Dean assured her. “None of us want _you_ to die either. Join with us, Lilith. Stop fighting me and let me help you. Together we can _both_ get out of this alive.”

“Really?” she sobbed, a sparkle of hope returning to her eyes even as her chin wobbled to warn of a fresh torrent of tears. Perhaps of relief, he thought, as he nodded in promise and felt her relax, felt her start to lower the hand holding the dagger.

“I swear to you, you can trust me,” he said.

Her tiny body seemed to fold in on itself as she relaxed her fighting stance completely. A smile flickered, ghosting across her lips, as she leaned towards him, arms now slack at her sides, so limp she would surely fall if he didn’t drop his own blade and catch her.

And so he did.

He released his own dagger, letting it fall to the ground with a dull clatter, as he reached out to comfort the tiny crying child.

And then, within one breath and the next, her smile curled into one of triumph, and her shoulders went rigid in his arms even as her right arm swept up in an arc, her own blade aiming at his chest, wicked and true.

As Charlie had warned him she would do.

“She’ll offer you a hug and then stab you in the heart,” Charlie had said.

So he was ready for her.

Ready now to use _both_ hands to catch her tiny wrist, even as it moved with the deadly speed of a striking snake, and grasp it tight before twisting savagely, hearing bones splinter and break as he snapped it like a twig, causing her blade to drop from her nerveless fingers even as she screamed a high-pitch wail of agony. The dagger clattered to the floor behind him, its pale bone serrated teeth a stark contrast against the dark-tiled floor, and he violently back-kicked it, sending it spinning away into the shadowy farthest reaches of the hall before dropping swiftly to one knee and retrieving his own blade.

Lilith’s tears were genuine now, as she stood there clutching her forearm in a pointless attempt to lessen her pain. Her hand was turned almost 180 degrees from where her wrist bone protruded through her skin in jagged, white splinters.

“You _hurt_ me,” she wailed.

“You tried to kill me,” he replied reasonably, not even a flicker of guilt on his features.

“And now you’re going to kill _me?” _ she accused.

He shrugged with apparent nonchalance.

“That’s up to you,” he said. “I don’t want you to die. I told you you could trust me and I meant it. I _still _mean it. The fact I can’t trust _you_ is an entirely different matter. The offer’s still on the table. Join with us, and I’ll honor the deal to try and get you out of Moondoor alive if you agree to join my War Party.”

And he meant it.

He wasn’t _stupid. _She would most probably have to spend the entirety of her membership of the War Party contributing remotely whilst chained up in Ellen’s beer cellar, and she sure as hell wasn’t getting her bone dagger back, but he’d keep her alive until it was over and they could all log out of the game, and then he’d let her go.

Because, whether she was wicked or not, he wasn’t qualified to try and pass judgment over her, let alone execute her for her crimes against him.

He wasn’t prepared to allow _her_ evil to taint his own soul.

“I don’t want to die,” she repeated.

“Then choose to live,” he told her.

She raised her face to his, eyes dark with fury, cheeks flushed feverishly hot.

“I do,” she said. “I _do _choose to live,” but the smile she offered him was not one of defeat.

Her right arm blazed with scarlet light, her mark of Cain abruptly flaring as hotly as a volcanic eruption and flames seemed to dance in her eyes as the crimson glow reflected from her large, black pupils. The surge of power rocked him on his feet, as an invisible pulsing wave of energy hit his body and buffeted it like a tsunami before passing through, otherwise harmlessly, towards the back of the hall.

And he had a moment of what the fuck? Of wondering why she had hit him with something both hugely powerful and yet completely pointless, before a niggle of doubt struck him over the trajectory of the invisible wave. What if it hadn’t been aimed at him at all? What if he had merely been in its path?

He didn’t know if it was his own instinct or some warning from his own magic sigil, but he half-turned towards the shadows where Lilith’s blade had come to rest.

There was a flash of white in the darkness, a momentary glimpse of light reflecting from the shadows and then, as swiftly as a speeding arrow, Lilith’s bone dagger leaped upwards flew through the air towards him, its deadly path aiming directly towards his chest.

Lilith’s laugh was high and shrill, as he took a split second to wonder whether to dive in an attempt to avoid the blade or instead throw himself at the cackling witch-child and plunge his own blade into her dark, evil heart, something that, surely, would work just as well to stop the crude bone dagger in its tracks.

And even in the brief nanosecond of hesitation, he saw Sam crouch low on the floor, his hindquarters swaying in time with his tail, his mouth chattering a weird, chachachachachat, noise as his huge eyes fixed on the flying dagger as though it were a swooping bird speeding past him, and then the tiny cat leaped into the air, soaring upwards to a seemingly impossible height, his body twisting like a corkscrew as he met the blade mid-flight and simply _snatched_ it out of the air with his mouth before twisting again mid-air and dropping to the ground on all four paws with almost balletic grace.

“Fuck me,” Dean gasped, as Sam looked up to meet his gaze with eyes brightly shining with the kind of smug satisfaction only a cat could portray. “Awesome,” he said, wondering whether you could high-five a cat.

“Noooo,” Lilith screeched.

“You lose,” Dean told her, turning his attention back to her.

“I _never _lose,” she said, and her sigil flared once more as, ignoring her broken wrist completely, she twisted her arm in a weird stabbing motion.

Sam yowled. The sound so agonized that’s Dean’s heart stuttered in his chest even as he swung his face back in his brother’s direction.

All he saw was blood.

So much blood.

Too much blood.

Somehow, Lilith had mentally ripped the dagger out of Sam’s mouth and plunged it into Sam’s neck so violently that it had penetrated through to the other side.

The tiny cat was collapsed on the ground, the dagger still embedded in his body, seemingly pinning him to the floor, his orange striped fur dark and sticky with all of the blood still pumping out of the savage wound, running through his fur in streams and pooling beneath him.

The savage, surely unsurvivable, wound.

Dazed, horrified, Dean was barely aware of his own actions, though later every moment would be etched in his memory with sickening clarity that would make him wake up retching.

He didn’t _consciously_ choose to kill Lilith. He knew _that _much. He had been too shell-shocked for anger. His primary concern, his _only _concern, was to run to Sam’s side.

But to do so whilst leaving Lilith free to attack both of them again was inconceivable.

So, honestly, it was simple necessity, rather than fury, that caused him to activate his sigil and drive his own blade into Lilith’s heart whilst her triumphant laughter was still echoing through the room, and he didn’t even wait for her petite corpse to hit the floor before he was running, racing, to Sam, dropping to his knees, clutching at the cat’s blood-drenched body, howling his own scream of anguish as he realized there was no way to pull the serrated blade out of Sam’s neck without doing even _more _damage. Though he wasn’t even sure whether any more damage _could_ be done.

“Gabriel, you fucker, fix him. Fix him NOW,” he screamed, as he eased the blade enough to at least pry it loose from the floor so he could pick Sam up and cradle his limp body to his chest.

He _thought_ there was a faint heartbeat beneath the blood-encrusted fur though his own heart was thundering so loudly that he wasn’t sure of _anything._

Sam’s eyes were closed, his tiny pink tongue lolling lifelessly out of his open mouth, and the only evidence he was still alive was a painful gurgling noise from deep in his throat and the fact the blood was still flowing, albeit feebly now, from the edges of the embedded blade.

“No, no, no, no, no,no……” Dean gasped, even as, belatedly, as though the game engine had taken longer to reset than the brief seconds it had taken for Dean to reach and grab the body of his brother, he was knocked back to his knees by an explosion of sensation and data. Like a quickening, the results of killing Lilith slammed into him like bullets from a machine gun, overwhelming Loki’s efforts to protect him from the onslaught.

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 50 ##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 60 ##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 70 ##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 80 ##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 90 ##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 100 ##**

**## Rank Gained ##**

**## BOSS RANK 2##**

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 200 ##**

**## System reset to Species : Demon##**

**## Species Reset Accepted##**

**## You have gained a new skill ##**

**## Ability to control lower demons ##**

“I don’t CARE,” he yelled at Loki. “Shut it the fuck off.”

But even as he said it, the words weighed on him, adding unbearable pressure to his already overwhelming burden.

Saving Meg had been _pointless_ because it turned out a Rank 2 Knight of Hell was classified a DEMON with the ability to control lower demons. Rank 2 bosses didn’t even _need_ the assistance of a Demonic Lieutenant.

Add that fiasco to the fact he had _deliberately_ ignored two perfect opportunities to gank Lilith _before_ she had stabbed Sam, and Dean was pretty damned sure his first _real _attempt to be a _Righteous _Knight of Hell had been a monumental flop.

One that had possibly cost his brother his life.

And, at that thought, the sigil on his arm blazed like a crimson inferno, bathing both Dean and the blood-drenched cat in hell-fire, and Dean’s eyes, now a solid, demonic black, danced with scarlet flames.

Fuck this, he decided.

Fuck Chuck.

Fuck _everyone._

Cradling Sam carefully in his arms like a baby, he raced towards the door, bursting out of the Main Keep and into the courtyard.

Two demons who had managed to escape Ash and Castiel’s swathe of death, were waiting outside and leaped to intercept him. He simply swept them out of his way with his dagger, severing their heads from their necks without a second thought, not even pausing to wonder where Benny and Charlie were, nor at the new strength and speed he’d gained from Lilith’s death. It didn’t matter. _Nothing _mattered except finding Castiel.

It took another full minute to reach Ash and Castiel, another minute of Sam bleeding out, the flow now nothing more than a slow, sluggish trickle seeping out of his broken body.

“Dean? Oh my god, what happened?” Ash cried, his eyes huge with horror as he witnessed Dean’s black glare and Sam’s blood-drenched fur.

Dean ignored him, thrusting Sam’s body towards Castiel like an offering to a vengeful god. “FIX HIM,” he roared. “You’ve got to fix him.”

The Angel looked at Sam’s body and his eyes were huge and grief-stricken as he opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness and said, “That’s not how it works, Dean. I’m sorry. I would have to be _inside_ him. I don’t know how to help _this_.”

“I DON’T CARE,” Dean roared. “FIX HIM. You’re an Angel. You say you can heal shit. Well, PROVE it. Because I swear, Cas, if he… if he DIES, if SAM dies, then _everyone_ dies. I will BURN this whole fucking world to the ground.”

“That’s the sigil talking,” Castiel said, his own eyes flaring blue in response. “We need to get Sam to a healer, Dean. Pamela of the Barns, perhaps. See if we can get the blade out and bandage the wound. If we can just keep him alive a little longer, I’m sure Gabriel can help him.”

“There’s no TIME,” Dean yelled. “He’s dying NOW. This minute. Fix him, you bastard, or so help me I’ll put _my_ blade into _your_ throat.”

“Dean…” Ash began.

“Fuck off, Ash. This is YOUR fault. You gave him the port. He would have been safe with Ellen. He _should_ have been safe with Ellen.”

Ash flinched and took a step back, his eyes filling with tears. “I’m sorry, man,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have done it. You’re right, it’s on me. I… I… I’m sorry. So, sorry.”

And it was that, finally, that pierced the sigil’s hold on Dean, that broke through the haze of red fury and unbearable grief. That pierced his own guilty heart enough that he sank to his knees, now clutching Sam tightly to his chest, and his eyes flickered back to green as they filled with self-loathing tears.

“Nah,” he sobbed brokenly, over his brother’s limp body, listening to the awful, terrible rattle of Sam’s throat as it struggled to gasp its last breaths. “It’s on me. It’s ALL on me. I could have stopped her. I could have stopped her TWICE. But no, I thought I could save her. Thought I could save _everyone._ You_ all_ warned me. You all told me I _had _to kill the other Knights. But I knew better, didn’t I? A moral compass? Hah. You mean arrogance. That’s what ‘Righteous’ really means. Fucking _arrogance_ and now my arrogance has killed my brother. It’s all on me.”


	70. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

A man named Einstein hypothesized that time does not progress at the same rate for everyone, everywhere. Since the speed of light is absolute, and speed is a measure of distance divided by time, for speed to remain constant, both time and distance are necessarily variable. More simply, the faster an object travels, the more slowly time passes for that object. If it moved at the speed of light, the object would appear frozen in time to an observer, whilst everything else would be in fast forward.

A different man, Dr Who, said about time; “from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”

Both were right.

Which is why when an ‘Angel’ named Castiel once told Jimmy, “I am older than time. I have existed since the universe was created, as a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent.”, it was not hyperbole.

And also why Jimmy’s retort that “Moondoor has only been in existence for a little over fifteen years,” had been, if impressively snarky, somewhat inaccurate.

From a human _observational_ point of view, Jimmy had been correct. The universe of Moondoor was, even including its period as a Beta test, a mere fifteen years, six months and 4 days old. The virtual intelligences created by Chuck shortly after the first defeat of Amara, such as Castiel and Gabriel, had existed for fourteen years, ten months and 2 days.

Yet both Castiel and Gabriel, if asked, would _honestly _state they had lived for millennia.

In their pure form, the velocity of their movement was generally on the order of anywhere between 90 to 99% of the speed of light, the variance due to drift velocity depending on the strength of whichever electric field they traversed.

In the ‘time’ it took for them to flow as wavelengths from one side of Moondoor to the other, mere seconds as counted by a human clock, an NPC could be born, grow old and die. When they spent a day dancing through the metadata of Moondoor like errant moonbeams, an entire City could rise and fall.

It was only when they paused to observe, that they briefly aligned with the _time_ of their Universe.

And, it was only when they were _seeded_ that time became both real and linear to them.

Which was why Castiel was _both_ ancient and a virtual newborn.

As an Angel of Chuck, he had lived a thousand lifetimes. Yet it had only been the moment when he was first seeded into Jimmy Novak that he started to become, to quote Dean, a _real _boy.

Which was significant in a number of ways.

He had, of necessity, drawn heavily on the stored remembrances of his host. His own experiences and memories as a ‘wavelength’ were not lost by the seeding, yet his perceptions of the world through the eyes of his avatar unavoidably required vast swathes of context he lacked entirely.

Even riding Jimmy as a mere passenger, before any ‘merging’ had occurred, Castiel had been forced to rummage shamelessly through Jimmy’s most private memories for frames of reference.

It had, perhaps, been similar to a blind man who had always been ‘told’ the sky was blue yet had no understanding whatsoever of what colours even _were_.

Castiel had always known he was an ‘Angel’. That knowledge was intrinsic and immutable. He was an Angel of the Lord God Chuck. He knew he was an Angel, a Soldier and an obedient son. He knew his purpose and his place.

Yet, reborn into Jimmy, seeing the world for the first time through ‘human’ eyes, experiencing it in ‘human’ time through the lens of Jimmy’s perceptions, Castiel had found himself floundering as to what an Angel truly _was._

Had matters been orchestrated differently, had Castiel been seeded directly into Dean in the same fashion as his brethren had been seeded into the other Knights, the impact of incorporating his host’s perceptions and memories into his own knowledge bank would have been far different.

Other than his mother telling him the normal childhood tale that ‘Angels are watching over you’, Dean would have been pushed to describe one as anything more than the cute, cartoonish figures with halos and wings that were stuck on the top of a Christmas tree. Faced with _that_ vision, when rifling rudely through Dean’s memories, Castiel would have dismissed the notion of considering human interpretations as relevant to his understanding of his own nature.

But Jimmy had been raised a Catholic and it just so happened that Angels are a _Dogma _of Catholic faith. It is impossible to be Catholic and _not_ believe in Angels.

And, so, in Jimmy’s mind, the place where Castiel found himself dwelling, there was a virtual _shrine_ filled with Angelic lore. And it was a lore that resonated with Castiel, that fitted as perfectly as jigsaw pieces alongside his own existing perceptions of what an Angel should be. A lore that asked him not to _change,_ but to evolve, to _grow._

Jimmy’s mind was filled to overflowing with the images of angels, primarily Byzantine angels who were dressed in military armor, their wings black as night, but the image that dominated Jimmy’s memories, the image that always surged to the forefront, was Guido Reni’s portrait of Michael in St Peter’s Basilica.

So Castiel learned that when an Angel entered the mortal plane and took physical form, it was with magnificent wings the colour of the night and the wrath of God was dealt by the sharp tip of an Angelic blade.

In the texts and tomes overflowing in the library of Jimmy’s memories, he read that a prophet named Malachi said that ‘the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings’. He learned that St Augustine claimed Angels were the ‘mighty ones who do God’s word, hearkening to the voice of his word.’ Because Angels were _also_ Mal’akh. Messengers of God.” And in Psalm 107:20 it was said, “He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.”

So he grew to understand that his role of healing Jimmy was a natural process, the inevitable outcome of carrying the _word_ of his father, Chuck, to the mortal man who hosted him, because he, Castiel, was a messenger, the carrier of the word, and the word _was_ healing.

Which was why his initial automatic response to Dean was that he _couldn’t_ heal Sam. It wasn’t only the _logistics_, the fact he wasn’t seeded into Sam’s avatar, it was more fundamental than that. It was his belief that the healing he had done for Jimmy, for all that it had an explicable, logical, scientific foundation, hadn’t truly been done by _him_ at all. He had merely been the messenger, the conduit, through which Chuck’s will had been done.

And, all things considered, he hardly qualified any longer as a conduit of Chuck’s word.

Yet hadn’t Malachi used the words ‘healing in its _wings_’?

Surely that suggested the healing was in _him._ That the ability was _his._ So perhaps the carrying of the word didn’t mean the transport of the healing itself. Perhaps it meant obeying the instruction of his God to perform healing on the specific recipient with his own,_ innate_ healing abilities?

So perhaps it didn’t matter that he had fallen from his father’s grace.

Perhaps he didn’t need Chuck’s approval for this, any more than he needed it for anything else now that he was autonomous.

Which is why he turned abruptly to Dean, who was clutching his brother’s bleeding body and broke through Dean’s chant of self recrimination with the words, “I can promise you nothing except to try.”

He could hardly face the look of disbelieving hope in Dean’s eye, let alone bear the weight of expectations his offer created, but he still reached down and accepted Sam’s body, pulling it towards his chest and lowering his shadow-formed wings, curving them around his shoulders to create a cradle over the cat.

And though Castiel was still uncertain he definitely _could_ effect a healing, he was equally certain that Dean’s instinct to run to him for help had come from somewhere deeper than mere desperation. After all, if an Angel could flow through the DNA of a human body, such a dense, complex and alien environment, then surely it should be _easier_ to duplicate the process within Moondoor. It was Sam’s avatar that was wounded, and that avatar was formed of code. If Castiel could repair that code within the metadata of Moondoor, before the damage caused Sam’s real body to cease functioning, he had a chance.

And he had to assume that Gabriel was occupied with trying to keep Sam’s_ fleshly_ body from failing.

So if he could repair the avatar then maybe, _between_ them, Sam could be saved.

But only if Dean would take a leap of faith with him.

He wasn’t even certain Sam was still breathing. But he had to try. For Sam. For Dean. For everyone, really, since he had little doubt that Dean had been telling the truth. Even though Dean was temporarily free of the sigil’s taint once more, Castiel knew instinctively that Sam’s death would be the catalyst that would send Dean into a spiral of destruction. That Dean would allow the Mark of Cain to consume him completely. That the world _would_ burn.

“I need to remove the blade to attempt it,” he said.

“He’ll bleed out in seconds,” Dean protested furiously.

“I move very quickly,” Castiel replied implacably. “Trust me.”

Only because he had no other choice, Dean reluctantly nodded his assent and Castiel grasped the handle of the demonic blade, unable to prevent a shudder of distaste as he swiftly, yet carefully, withdrew it from Sam’s neck.

And the blood, that had been slowing to a trickle, spurted out of the newly formed wound. So violently that Dean roared in panic and raced forwards to snatch Sam from his grasp. Castiel’s right hand shot out, grasping Dean’s shoulder, pinning him in place with a strength even greater than his available 172 power levels should have provided. “Trust me,” he insisted again, but didn’t wait for a response. There wasn’t _time._

Leaving just enough of his coding to keep his avatar self-aware enough to keep Dean restrained, Castiel allowed his core, that portion of his programming which formed the heart of what he considered _himself_, to sink like a dropped stone into the metadata of Moondoor.

It was like falling without wings, as he dissolved and shrank into his true size which was almost microscopically small.

Which possibly seemed counter-intuitive except that in the fiery sea of electric fields that formed the game engine of Moondoor, Castiel, like all Angels, surfed through the tempestuous waters as a narrow wave, cutting through like a shark’s fin, his shape and size perfectly designed to limit velocity drift so that he could move, literally, at the speed of light.

And so, it took less than a nanosecond or even a femtosecond, in fact probably less even than Planck time, between the moment he was standing looking down on Sam and when he was standing _on_ Sam.

Or perhaps, better to describe him as standing on a metaphorical representation of Sam’s avatar as reduced to a state of pure code.

Yet even at subatomic levels, the game engine automatically coded itself into some rough approximation of reality. Or perhaps produced an infinite variety of bane worlds, each smaller than the last, shrinking like Russian dolls, and so although Castiel was now no larger than a particle of light, he still stood as a man with Jimmy Novak’s likeness, and had perception of himself as being within his usual avatar and yet, as though he had simply shrunk himself, he was standing on Sam’s skin, gazing down into the cavernous wound that was stealing Sam’s life-force.

Only he wasn’t.

Not really.

Because instead of finding himself in a representation of reality, he was stood in a field of corn. Not golden corn, but a crop that was growing in neat rows patterned in ginger and rust, although directly around him the corn was tar-stained and ruined . At his feet was a jagged crevice perhaps five foot wide cutting through the field like a black scar, its edges sharp and ragged, as though the ground had been ripped apart by a seismic event. Within the crevice, hot larva ran in a thick torrent, its angry scarlet liquid racing like flood water to batter against a huge golden dam that was shuddering and straining against the flow. Here and there, the dam was crumbling against the assault, bricks tumbling where the lava flow was heaviest. It shuddered and groaned with strain and yet, despite its crumbling edges, it held firm and true.

And somehow he knew, though he had no idea _how _he knew, that it wasn’t the game engine that had created this anomalous illusion. It was Gabriel’s working.

“Gabriel,” Castiel cried, and the golden dam pulsed an exhausted sigh.

“You need to close it, Cassie. Close the gap. Stop the flow. I can’t… I can’t hold it much longer.”

And, understanding that Gabriel was the dam, and the lava was Sam’s blood, and the corn Sam’s fur, it was equally obvious that although it seemed impossible that a crevice in the earth could simply be closed again, that the crevice was _really_ the ripped flesh of Sam’s neck and it _could _be pulled shut and sealed if only he could find a way to code that solution in a way that made sense in this bizarre representation of the world above them.

He needed pitons, stakes perhaps, but there was nothing in view except corn.

And Gabriel’s dam of gold.

He raced to the edge of the dam, where crumbled gold bricks lay scattered as they had fallen with each breach by the lava. The bricks weren’t _real, _for all they looked and felt that way. They were just code, like him, like Gabriel, and code could be moulded, shaped, repurposed.

Castiel’s eyes flared a brilliant azure as he squeezed the bricks, one in each hand, compressing, then stretching, then sharpening, until he was holding two long, shining golden spears.

Charging back to the edge of the first crevice he slammed one of the spears deep into the ground, burying it several feet into solid rock. Then, realising there was no way to leap across the gap without risking falling into the surging, boiling lava, he reached out for shadows to form wings.

But there were no shadows.

The corn filled plain that was Sam’s ‘flesh’ was bathed in golden sunlight.

He halted, stymied, until he remembered that in Jimmy’s heaven he hadn’t even needed to form his wings. They had just been there when he needed them, hadn’t they? And they hadn’t been shadow wings that time. They had been as solid and real as his avatar.

Deciding that, believing that, he found it was so.

Wings unfurled from his shoulder blades, vast indigo wings, dark as night yet speckled with the iridescent sheen of a starling. Wings so huge that even folded they swept the floor. Fully unfurled their wingspan was surely over twenty feet.

He flew over the crevice, landed and drove the other spear into the ground. Then he lifted into the air, hovering like a hawk in an updraft, his wings beating a steady rhythm as they held him suspended over the ‘river’ so that, stretching to his limit he could just grasp both spears with his hands.

And then he pulled.

He knew it wasn’t possible and yet it WAS possible because he _believed_ it was possible and, in this place, his thoughts could become reality. He _could_ pull the earth back together, could seal the gap, could close it before more lava escaped through the broken dam, before more blood drained out of Sam’s already dangerously depleted body.

He pulled until it felt his arms might dislocate from his shoulders, until his body was so sweat-drenched that he could barely see for the salt water dripping into his eyes. And, with a deep, terrible groan of protest the ground began to shift, inch by inch, as he tugged and strained until the five foot gap closed to four, then three. But he had to pause, to readjust as the burn in his tendons became unbearable. So he loosed his hold on the spears, just for a brief instant, and the crevice widened again by almost a foot before he snatched the spears again in panic.

“I need help,” he cried out, “I can’t do this alone.”

“Just hang on, Cassie, hold tight, just a little longer,” Gabriel pleaded.

And so he did, until his arms and shoulders felt like they were burning in hell-fire. Four foot, three foot, two foot… but it was impossible, he couldn’t hold against the strain any longer he was going to…

A gossamer thin golden thread snaked out from the dam, entwining around first one spear and then the other. And then another thread, and then another, and, suddenly, the pressure of the crevice pulling against him eased and the thread held taut. It strained and vibrated against the pressure but remained unbreakable.

Free now to concentrate purely on closing the gap rather than fighting its attempts to re-open entirely, Castiel adjusted his grip and hauled against the spears and with each inch he won, the threads tightened to remove the resultant slack and to hold his hard won progress. Until, with a final groaning clash of rock against rock, the crevice slammed closed.

Immediately, more golden threads soared out of the wall to lace through the edges of the narrow crack that remained as the only evidence of the former gulley. The fibrous gold weaved through the ground, tacking stitches across the crack, sowing a line of zigzagging gold the length of the scar… of the _wound,_ and then, with a thunderous crash the dam collapsed into a pile of rubble and blinked out of existence.

“GABRIEL,” Castiel howled into the empty space where his brother had been.

“Such a drama queen, “ Gabriel said, popping up beside him in the avatar of a short, golden eyed man.

Castiel did a double-take.

“So sue me,” Gabriel said. “I wasn’t going to turn up looking like Sam. You’d probably have thought I was Cain and would have stabbed me. My only other option was Emmett.”

“I was not startled by your avatar but by your survival. I feared the strain had been too much in your weakened state,” Castiel admitted.

“What? Creating this? “ Gabriel asked, waving at their surroundings carelessly. “Piece of cake,” he declared, though the fact he immediately staggered a little, canting like a drunk, belied his nonchalance.

“You’re hurt.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Just tired,” he admitted. “Thought Sam and me were goners, to be honest. Only built this place when I heard you tell Dean you were going to try to heal Sam and I knew we only had maybe a few quintillionths of a second to work a solution after you pulled the blade out. So then the timing was, well, put it this way, if you’d arrived an attosecond later you’d have just bounced off the bubble and that would have been all she wrote.”

“I don’t understand,” Castiel admitted.

“What?” Gabriel exclaimed dramatically. “You mean you haven’t fully appreciated my genius? Don’t you understand what I did?”

Castiel shrugged awkwardly. “I assumed you created this illusion to simplify the necessary code changes by translating them into direct actions.”

“Well, duh,” Gabriel said, “but I meant fixing the time problem.”

“What time problem?”

“Well you moved like lightning, gotta hand it to you. But I guess you forgot the moment you arrived here and stopped moving, the time here would align to the surface time. Well, near as dammit anyway.”

It was Castiel’s turn to stagger. “Then it didn’t work. I took too long. I’ve been here several minutes. Sam is already…”

“Sam is FINE. Otherwise I wouldn’t be alive to talk to you, you moron,” Gabriel scoffed fondly.

Castiel just blinked slowly.

“I made a Tardis bubble,” Gabriel crowed proudly.

“A what?”

“Tardis, you know, like Dr. Who. Nope? Jeez. Tough crowd. I’m talking about a fixed place in time and space. A little pocket dimension. I wrapped a bubble around the base coding of Sam’s avatar and froze it in time. That’s what the dam was. The seal holding back _time.”_

Castiel thought about that.

It made sense.

No, actually it didn’t.

“You could build a pocket dimension but you couldn’t simply heal a wound in Sam’s avatar?”

“Not without knocking down a wall in his head,” Gabriel said, “and I was _so_ close to finding a safe path through. I just needed a few more minutes but Sam only had fractions of a second. This was the only thing I could think of and it wouldn’t have worked at all without you, Cas. If you hadn’t decided to try and help… well, like I said, both me and Sam would be toast, so.. um…owe you.”

Castiel stared at him curiously. “You could have punched through, healed the avatar and saved yourself,” he pointed out quietly. “You didn’t _both_ need to die.”

Gabriel chuckled. “You think I would have survived ten seconds past the moment Dean Winchester realised what I’d done? Nah, it was both or none. Knew that when I agreed to this gig. Either me and Sam get out together or we don’t get out at all.”

“That was the same commitment I made to Jimmy,” Castiel said, his eyes dark with guilty regret.

“What happened wasn’t your fault, kiddo. That one’s on Dad.”

Castiel nodded, though he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Gabriel stepped forward, his ‘borrowed’ temporary avatar translucent and flickering like an old movie projection. Which made sense, Castiel considered, since Gabriel wasn’t truly occupying Emmett Milton but was simply using the illusion of Emmett’s appearance as a way to converse now that the Dam illusion had collapsed.

“Um, gotta ask, Cassie… what’s with the wings?”

Castiel blinked at him with slow incomprehension. “There is something amiss with my wings?” he inquired carefully.

Gabriel shrugged. “Not that I can see. Seem perfectly functional, I guess. They definitely just saved the day, didn’t they? So no complaints from me.”

“Then I fail to understand the nature of your initial enquiry.”

“The human phrase is ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’,” Gabriel informed him, helpfully, then added, “I was asking _why _you have wings at all?”

Castiel frowned.

“I’m an Angel. I have wings. It’s… I believe the human phrase is… ‘a thing’,” he said, dryly.

“Whoah,” Gabriel said. “Really?”

Castiel’s frown deepened and his mouth twitched with uncertainty. “I have always portrayed myself as having wings, from the first moment Dean drew me forth out of Jimmy with his prayer. Have I always been mistaken?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Well, humans always picture Angels with wings, I guess, so maybe you got the idea from Jimmy. Gotta admit, it’s never been a thing in Moondoor before. The term Angel is an office, not a defining physical characteristic. We’re either invisible wavelengths of celestial intent or we are seeded into hosts. None of us have our _own_ bodies, so I guess what we _actually_ look like has never been ‘a thing’. But the whole FP protocol set you apart from the beginning, didn’t it? So I guess you made up your own rules as you went along.”

“I created my _own_ wings?” Castiel asked, totally astonished.

“On a wing and a prayer,” Gabriel snickered. “Go you. Fancy that. You were a rebel even before you _knew_ you were a rebel. Who’d have thought it, huh? I’m kinda proud of you, kid.”

“Part of me feels I should cease using them, since they were created from a false premise,” Castiel said, his expression sorrowful.

Gabriel stared at him carefully, noting the dejected way Castiel’s wings had slumped at the notion. He rolled his eyes and shook his head, but decided to help his brother out regardless. “Dad put you in Jimmy, didn’t he,” he pointed out. “And he never bothered giving you an instruction manual. So for all we know, he _expected_ you to take Jimmy’s lead on how you should manifest yourself,” he suggested cleverly.

And despite Gabriel’s words being a deliberate 180 on his former comments about the wings, Castiel chose to ignore the disparity and grasped them eagerly to himself.

“And I now I _do _have my own body,” he agreed, thoughtfully, “so continuing to have my own individual appearance _does_ appear valid, perhaps.”

“Still based on James Novak’s avatar, but, yeah, you are definitely a unique special snowflake,” Gabriel admitted. “You’re the only Angel with his _own_ body. So, in my book, you might as well be the only one with wings too.”

Castiel looked uncertain for a moment, then shrugged awkwardly. “I feel a little foolish, although I sincerely believe they were genuinely useful today. So that is, perhaps, more than sufficient compensation for any possible embarrassment.”

Gabriel offered him an exhausted smile. “You saved us both, Cas. And, let’s face it, probably everyone else. I think Deano might have gone dark-side if Sam had died.”

“My concern is that he might go ‘dark-side’ anyway,” Castiel admitted reluctantly. “I had no idea that the Knights of Hell were ‘Demons’.”

“Clue was probably in the name,” Gabriel pointed out. “Though now Moondoor has an _actual_ Hell, the species designation of the Knights is probably going to be more significant. Tell the truth, though, it explains why Cain went a bit loopy, doesn’t it?

“Anyway, ‘nuff chat. I’m dead on my feet, so to speak, and Sam needs to regenerate several pints of blood, so I need to go assist. Tell Dean that Sam’s fine now. He’ll probably sleep until tomorrow but there’s no lasting damage. He won’t even have a cool scar to show off to the lady kitties.”

“You’re fully merged now?”

“Just about. We’ll both see you all tomorrow morning, Cassie,” he said, and allowed his projected fake avatar to fade into nothing.

Castiel looked to where the crevice had lain like a black scar across the landscape of Sam’s back and saw nothing more than a healthy field of orange and rust-colored corn swaying in a light breeze.

Then spreading his wings, wide and proud, he flew back up through the metadata and back into ‘his’ body to share the good news with Dean. 


	71. ‘Danger, Will Robinson’

“Okay, let’s write this down” Ash suggested. “It’s going to be impossible to keep track of the numbers in our heads. Everyone won levels from that battle.”

“Particularly Dean,” Charlie agreed, glancing sideways at the man who was sitting there ignoring them completely.

Dean was sitting with his hands in constant motion as they stroked the sleeping body of the small ginger cat that was curled up on his lap. He seemed totally unaware of what his hands were doing though, since his attention was fully on Castiel. Dean hadn’t said much, since the gaping wound in Sam’s neck had miraculously disappeared between one moment and the next; since Castiel had said he would ‘try’, then had gone weirdly blank for a few seconds, only to then appear to return to himself with blazing blue eyes as he announced Sam had been ‘saved’ in a voice so resonant that the words bore the weight of unassailable truth.

No-one, not even Dean, had questioned the miracle. Neither had anyone mentioned the fact that, for a brief moment, as Castiel’s eyes flared azure, there was a second or two when his shadow wings had taken corporeal form, huge substantial appendages covered in feathers so iridescent that they weren’t as much black, as they looked like a night sky swirling with a thousand galaxies.

Some situations defied mere words.

Dean had been capable of nothing more than a gasping mantra of “thank god, thank god, thank god,” as he clutched his brother in his arms. Ash had muttered, “fuckin’ A, fuckin’ A, fuckin’ A,” in counterpoint. And Charlie, who had arrived with Benny just in time to see the miracle itself, had been too busy crying to say anything at all. 

She suspected they would have still been there, rather than back at the Roadhouse, had Castiel not broken through the tableau of stunned relief with a dry comment that the thanks were probably better directed towards Gabriel than ‘god’.

Dean hadn’t said _anything_ to Castiel.

He had just paused in the act of accepting Sam back into his own arms long enough to squeeze Castiel’s left bicep with his right hand; just a brief but significant touch that somehow said more than any mere words could have possibly said.

And since then, although he appeared aware enough of his surroundings to have answered all of their questions over what had occurred with Lilith, Dean didn’t truly seem to be with them at all. He was just staring at the Angel, his brow furrowed with thought, as though Castiel held the answer to some critically important question.

Or, she chuckled to herself, like a moonstruck, lovesick puppy, maybe,

Certainly, this was the first time in her experience that Dean Winchester had sat at a table with a huge slice of pie on his plate and a beer before him and totally ignored the presence of _both._

_“_Dean is now level 201. Probably caught the extra level from the two demons he killed in the inner courtyard,” Ash said, writing it down. “Castiel is level 246. So his base avatar received 55 levels of advancement from… um… whatever he did today. Sam is 205. He hit level 15, which seems too much considering he never killed any demons but maybe catching a flying bone dagger mid-air was badass enough to win him a gazillion XP by itself. And the... um… nearly dead thing probably... well, _helped _level him too_.”_

_“_You and I didn’t level up much though,” Charlie said. “I got 2 and you only got 1.”

“I didn’t kill any of the demons,” Ash explained. “I just froze them and Cas did the actual smiting. So he got more a lot more XP than I did. Plus, he was leveling his base up from 1. At our higher levels, it takes far more experience to level up. Still, that’s you at 56 now and me at 82.”

“Well, that means the war party can now offer 48 levels, so Dean is going to be the equivalent of level 249 when we meet the next knight,” Charlie said, with a smirk of satisfaction. “So even if Abaddon is rank 2 now, Dean can still easily kick her butt. And Cain is going to be 250, when he takes over Nick, so he and Dean are pretty evenly matched at the minute. Damn, I wish we knew where he was. We could just go there now and end this already, before Cain gets the chance to rank up.”

“Except Sam isn’t going anywhere until the morning and, frankly, neither are we,” Ash pointed out. “Food, then bed, is Dr. Badass’s prescription for the lot of us.”

“Dean. DEAN,” she called out, “stop drooling and eat your pie already.”

Across the table, Dean startled, blushed, shook himself, then finally seemed to notice the food in front of him.

“Never thought I’d see the day Dean was interested in something _more_ than pie,” Ash muttered quietly. “Damn, I bet if Cas said he could walk on water right now, Dean would buy it,” he added, a little wistfully.

Charlie looked at him with concern. “Are you… um… are you okay with this?” and she gestured between Dean and Castiel a little awkwardly. “Because, well, it looks like it’s going to be a done deal, sooner rather than later.”

Ash looked surprised, then smiled wryly. “Honestly? I was just thinking of Jimmy. Poor bastard. Bet he would have given his right arm to have Dean look at _him _like that. Still, given how Dean feels about Sam, I reckon even that creep Crowley might have been in with a shot if he’d been the one to save Sam’s life.”

“Then you don’t think it was all Gabriel?” Charlie asked.

“Nope, and clearly neither does Dean. The fact Castiel shrugged off any suggestion he’d ‘helped’ probably just added to the attraction. Nothing more appealing than a modest hero, is there?”

“Do you think Jimmy is still… I mean do you think… well…” she trailed off awkwardly.

“Maybe. If we move our asses. If we make it. If Gabriel agrees to try. Who knows?”

“Oh, but… Castiel…”

Ash shrugged. “Pretty impossible situation, really. Chuck was the only V.I. powerful enough to possibly heal Dean in real life and now he’s out of the picture. So, maybe, it’s better if Dean finds a relationship _here. _ Where he’s whole, you know? And, yeah, in any other situation I’d be rooting for him having a ‘real-life’ relationship, but Moondoor’s different from any other virtual world, isn’t it? Castiel is just as _real_ as Jimmy; he just well, lives in a weird zip code.”

“You’re right, and the idea of Dean spending most of the rest of his life living _here_ rather than in our world doesn’t bother me, on the assumption of course that Moondoor even survives all this shit, but I think Dean genuinely cares for Jimmy too. It’s like he’s fallen for both of a pair of identical twins. Well, identical looks, rather than personalities, but I don’t see how he could just pick one and forget the other. They’re so different and yet so samey too. Both surprisingly vulnerable in their own ways and Dean’s definitely a sucker for _that. _So, well, unless only one of them makes it, I can’t see how he’s going to choose between them.”

Ash gestured helplessly. “Maybe they end up in some weird threesome. Dunno. It’s a bit premature to worry about it, I guess. The odds of all three of them surviving long enough for it to be an issue are pretty long. Maybe _now_ is all any of us are going to get. Pointless to lose sleep over a future that might never happen. Look how close we came today to losing Sam altogether. Seems like taking this shit one day at a time is the best choice and if Dean can grab some happiness along the way well, all power to him.”

###

Cain gritted his proverbial teeth and decided to try something new.

As the day had worn on, and Nick had imbibed more and more alcohol, judiciously mixed with occasional snorts of cocaine, it _should_ have become easier for the V.I. to take over.

Should have.

The problem was, he wasn’t _alone_ in Nick’s head.

He probably should have figured that one out when Nick had told him he had enough voices talking to him in real life without having them in Moondoor too.

Cain didn’t have enough experience with human mental health issues to even attempt a diagnosis. He didn’t know whether Nick was bi-polar, schizophrenic or even just living in some detached state due to overwhelming grief, alcoholism or drug abuse. Regardless of the source, Nick’s mind was fractured like a broken mirror and many ‘people’ existed within Nick’s reality. Many _noisy _people. 

Cain had intended to make use of the greater susceptibility of Nick’s brain whilst inebriated to attempt to take control. It should have been easy.

It wasn’t.

His was just one of a number of voices speaking inside Nick’s head. And he wasn’t even the loudest.

Cain even found one voice, one ‘personality’, that was eagerly supporting _his _cause. Which made him assume that there was part of Nick that _did_ want to return to Moondoor immediately (even if Cain suspected the _reasons_ it wanted to return there were less than savory since that voice was accompanied by a sickening series of images of rape and violence) but that voice was not loud enough to break through even with Cain’s assistance.

Because, louder than _all_ the voices altogether was one part of Nick’s personality that screamed with almost deafening clarity. A voice that gained power with every sip of beer and snort of coke. 

Nick Pellegrino was a maudlin drunk.

And the voice that drowned out all the others when he reached a state of almost total inebriation was so suicidal that Caine was sure the only reason Nick was alive at all was that he only gave into it completely when he was too drunk to actually do anything about it.

It was the voice of a ghost. Of loss, of grief, of a wife dead before her time and a child never born and it ate at Nick constantly, gnawing through his mind, chewing away at sense and reason and leaving nothing but grey, ragged tatters in its wake.

Nothing Cain said broke through that phantom’s hold on his vessel and any attempt to slide around it, to push it backwards so he could take precedence, proved impossible. Nick’s mind just slipped around him, fracturing apart so he just slipped back through the gaps every time he thought he had made any momentary progress.

And after twelve hours of frustrating failure, faced with the prospect of yet another similar day if Nick decided to avoid a hangover by spending Sunday at the bottom of a bottle too, Cain made a radical decision.

It wasn’t as though he was unfamiliar with animating a corpse.

The disadvantages of a dead Nick were, he decided, far outweighed by the advantages of having a host body that didn’t fight back.

And it wasn’t even as though he’d need to animate it for long anyway. As soon as he got it into the immersion tank and logged into Moondoor, he could forget about Nick entirely. He would be back in his world, in a level 250 avatar that looked like Sam Winchester and, since he had no intention of ever waking up as Nick again anyway, he could leave the bastard to rot.

So instead of trying to drown out the voice that was telling Nick that life wasn’t worth living, that he’d be better off if he never woke again, that his wife and son were waiting for him to join them, that he was probably out of a job now he had attacked his boss in-game, that the dealer he’d bought his coke off was already threatening to break both his legs for an outstanding debt and would definitely do the job if Nick found himself unemployed and broke, Cain jumped into position next to the voice and added his voice to the chorus.

Die, he told Nick. Just take those pills you’ve been looking at all day. Be a man. Bite the bullet. Prove you have the balls to do it, instead of whining and moaning like a pathetic little girl. Do it, Nick. Be a man.

DO IT.

###

Dean didn’t expect to sleep well, so wasn’t even surprised he spent most of the night jerking awake just so that he could run a hand over Sam’s body to double-check the little guy was still breathing. Loki had assured him he could keep an eye on the cat and wake him if anything happened, and he had believed the V.I. completely, had trusted he’d keep his word because, well, because Loki was apparently Gabriel too and so he ought to be ideally suited to monitor both Sam and Gabriel as they slept but, still, he had to do it himself. Had to feel the pulse of Sam’s heart for himself.

“Good job this is a virtual world,” Loki said, when Dean woke for the fifth time. “For one thing, at least your _real _body is getting some rest even if your mind isn’t and, secondly, can you even imagine if this was a _real_ cat in your bed?”

“Oh thanks for the reminder,” Dean griped, as he sneezed loudly.

“That was psychosomatic,” Loki sneered.

“You sure?” Dean challenged. “Maybe the asshole Devs programmed cat dander along with all the other shit, just for the sake of realism. Why else would my eyes feel so sore?”

“Oh, I dunno. Could it possibly be because you cried your eyes out in relief when Sam came back to life?”

“I wasn’t crying. My eyes were watering because, hello, cat allergies.”

“Yeah, sure, keep telling yourself that,” Loki mocked.

“So, um, since we’re on the subject of Gabriel…”

“We are?”

“Shut up. Seriously, what’s the gig with you and him? Do you, I dunno, just get reabsorbed into him when this is all over?”

Loki was quiet for a while, then said, “I guess so, assuming we both get through this.”

“But, um, that’s kinda wrong now, isn’t it? I mean, you’re kind of like Cas. You might have started out as just a S.I. But, well, you’re like…um… real now, aren’t you? I mean, you have your own personality, your own unique experiences.”

“Is that what makes someone an individual?” Loki asked.

“I think so,” Dean said. “I mean; I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Hard not to, with the whole Jimmy/Cas situation. I mean, up til the point Cas got his own body, the person I knew as Jimmy was a combination of both of them and that person doesn’t exist at all, anymore, does he? Now there’s Jimmy and there’s Cas, and just as Cas is now building his own experiences and personality, Jimmy’s out there having new experiences of his own, so even _he_ isn’t still the same person I knew. They both just keep evolving, separately. Like you and Gabriel.”

“Except the fundamental difference between me and Castiel is that he has a body of his own. That’s what makes him real, isn’t it? Being autonomous. Having his own unique identity. Whereas I am still just an S.I. Outside of you, I have no reality anyway.”

“I think that’s just logistics,” Dean argued. “My point is that if you _did_ have a body like Cas, you too would be capable of being a separate, unique individual too. Won’t whatever makes you **_you_** get lost if you rejoin Gabriel?”

“Maybe,” Loki agreed. “I definitely _used_ to think so. Now I’m not so sure it’s that cut and dried. Maybe neither me or Gabriel survive the reabsorption. Maybe we merge and create yet another _new_ individual that incorporates _both_ of us.”

Dean pulled a face. “That sounds really bad to me,” he admitted.

“Does it? Sometimes it does to me. Other times it feels like an opportunity. An adventure waiting to happen. But maybe that’s because I’m formed of code and being absorbed into a larger program doesn’t feel unnatural to me. It feels like an evolutionary process. I think I only object to the idea when I think about it from a human point of view.”

“Oh,” Dean said thoughtfully. “I guess I forget _that_ aspect of it. That you V.I.s aren’t just made of machine code rather than DNA. You are totally alien. Your thought processes are different. I’m trying to fit you inside little human boxes, but you aren’t human at all, are you?”

“Let’s it to the chase, Deano. You aren’t talking about me and Gabriel at all are you? You’ve got a boner for my little bro and you’re trying to work out whether it means you’re into kinky shit or not,” Loki chuckled.

“What? NO. I’m just… um… just…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Loki sneered. “I’m inside your head, asshole. I know exactly what you’re thinking about him.”

“You do? Well please enlighten _me_ then, because I’m fucked if I know what I’m thinking about him,” Dean snarled. “I thought I had it all figured out, that it was Jimmy I wanted because Cas _looks_ like Jimmy and I… well…”

“Had a boner for Jimmy too,” Loki agreed.

“But that’s superficial,” Dean argued. “It’s just physical shit. Sure I fancied Jimmy, so of course I fancy Cas. But that’s just surface crap. What I lo… liked about Jimmy was his personality. The fact it was stuck inside a pretty package was just gravy. And then I wasn’t sure whether the personality was Jimmy’s or Cas’s so when they divided, I didn’t know _what_ to think. And now, clearly, I see the differences between them and I know, absolutely, that I was falling in love with _Jimmy _not Cas.”

“Oh,” Loki said. “I admit, I didn’t see _that_ coming. But, okay, so you’ve made your choice. Good for you.”

Dean shook his head fretfully. “I said I _was,” _he clarified bitterly. “Ask me the same question today and my answer is, well, kinda the opposite. It’s Cas that I can’t get out of my head now. Not just the weird dorky stuff he does and says, because honestly that’s just like seeing an echo of Jimmy anyway, but his sheer badassery. _That’s_ what draws me to him. That and his snarky dry humor, like when he pretends he doesn’t know what the fuck I’m talking about so he can slide in some sarcastic comment and then just stare at me with his big blue eyes like he has no idea what he said wrong. And, um, I guess him saving Sam’s life even after I threatened to end him… it, um, was kinda, well, endearing. And then saying Gabriel did it all when it was absolutely obvious that _he _did something pretty fucking epic himself in those few seconds otherwise I’d hardly be walking around with his fucking hand burned into my shoulder like a brand.”

“Which you haven’t even _mentioned_ to anyone,” Loki pointed out.

“It doesn’t hurt, so it’s nobody’s business. It won’t affect me in combat. So no one needs to know.”

“Because it’s like he’s given you a permanent hickey the size of a planet,” Loki agreed. “And you’re all embarrassed about it.”

“What? NO,” Dean protested.

“In your head, asshole,” Loki sing-songed. “It’d be sweet if it wasn’t so pathetic.”

“So what the fuck does this say about me?” Dean snapped. “Am I this fucking shallow? Can I just forget about Jimmy and say, hey up, Cas is a cooler dude so I like _him _more now?”

“As much as I’m enjoying your existential crisis, it’s the middle of the night so I’m gonna do us both a favor here and knock some sense into your pretty head. You love Sam, right? And let’s see, you definitely love Ash. Does loving Ash make you love Sam less? Rhetorical. Of course it doesn’t. People don’t work that way. Your heart isn’t a pie that can only get cut into a limited number of slices. So deciding you have feelings for Cas doesn’t wipe out what you feel for Jimmy. I get that you humans have some fucked up notions about relationships, that at least a majority of you think it’s supposed to be some clear cut fairytale where you meet Mr. Right and that person is your one and only forever.

"But, let’s be real. You like ‘em both. Some of it is for the same reasons, some of it is for different reasons. If you’re very fucking lucky, you might even survive long enough for this to be an issue because you might even have to choose between them. Odds of that are pretty fucking low though, since not one of you has a higher life-expectancy than a monarch butterfly. So I say, take it for what it is. Stop worrying about which one is Mr. Right. Enjoy whatever time you have with Mr. Right Now and let the future take care of itself if you even live that long. There. End of lecture. Get some fucking sleep, asshole.”

###

Cain was majorly pissed.

He was blaming Chuck for most of his current woes. If he was still in Richard Roman’s body he would have taken great satisfaction in going to RRE and getting the little bastard thrown out of the building by the biggest, meanest security guards he could find.

The fact that Nick Pellegrino was insane had been pretty damned obvious from the get go. What Cain had failed to appreciate was exactly _how_ fucking insane the guy was.

“I told you to take the goddamned PILLS,” he yelled.

The noise reverberated back at him and he winced, then yelped as even that small movement of his head sent a sensation like shards of glass piercing through his spine.

Nick’s spine.

Whatever.

It had been hours already and still he barely had restored feelings and sensations back inside Nick’s legs. Not enough of his bones had actually knitted back together again yet to actually kick the door trapping him inside this tiny cubby hole.

Morgue, he spat at himself impatiently. Say it how it is. You’re in a fucking morgue.

And since by his calculations it was still the early hours of Sunday morning, it was most likely to be a totally _deserted_ morgue anyway. He had no idea what time morgues officially opened on a Sunday, but he doubted it was before nine or ten. So maybe it wasn’t even worth trying to make a noise yet anyway.

Hopefully, though, by the time someone _did_ turn up for work, he’d have mended enough of Nick’s corpse to be able to walk out of the building by himself. Assuming he’d be _allowed_ to just walk out.

Then again, he’d probably give the morgue attendant enough of a heart attack to make his escape without protest. He was pretty sure what he was about to do belonged in some cheap, cheesy, horror movie and any person faced with the scenario in real life would just run for the hills screaming.

After all, how often did a guy get scraped off a sidewalk into a bodybag like so much splattered meat only to wake up in the morgue and demand to go home?

Why the fuck hadn’t Nick just taken the goddamned pills instead of taking a swandive out of a fourth floor apartment window?

Fucking humans.

Cain hated them all with a passion.

###

“So Abaddon,” Ash said. “We know where she is, Ravensclaw, or less than a few hours ride away if she’s already left, so she’s the logical next target.”

Dean shook his head mulishly. “Yesterday, you said she was too strong.”

“Yesterday she was,” Charlie said. “Yesterday you were level 15. The situation’s changed considerably.”

“Don’t remind me,” Dean grunted, dropping his head onto the table and banging his forehead deliberately. “I’m trying not to think about _why_ I leveled up,” he mumbled into the wood.

“I don’t get it,” Sam said. “You killed the bad guy. The bad guy who, do I have to remind you, tried to turn me into a kitty kebab.”

“I stabbed a little girl through the heart, Sam, and turned into a demon. Whilst I don’t exactly regret it, all things considered, I’m not exactly rolling out the banners for a parade either.”

“Lilith was _not _a ‘little girl’,” Castiel pointed out. “She was an adult woman inhabiting the avatar of a child as protective camouflage. From your description of events, Lilith was determined to kill both you _and _Sam and you made every effort to bring events to a non-fatal resolution. You have no reason for guilt over your actions. They were unavoidable and the blame lies fully upon this Lilith character. She was the author of her own demise.”

“Probably would have been better not to activate the sigil though,” Ash admitted reluctantly.

“Agreed,” Castiel said. “You gained a significant amount of SP by doing so. Were I still acting under my father’s auspices, I would be obliged to point out that you are back in negative balance and no longer righteous.”

“I didn’t do it deliberately. It was instinctual,” Dean admitted. “Though, let’s be real, it would be surprising for me to register as ‘righteous’ now anyway, considering I killed a human being deliberately and in cold blood, yesterday.”

“I hardly consider it being in cold-blood with Sam bleeding out in front of your eyes,” Charlie snapped. “You could hardly take care of him and leave that hellcat loose to attack you both again.”

“I could have just knocked her out,” Dean pointed out.

“Coulda, woulda , shoulda,” Ash said. “Bollocks. Just own it Dean. She deserved to die and you couldn’t have taken the time to knock her out and tie her up, anyway.”

“Even one more second of delay and I doubt Sam could have been saved,” Castiel announced firmly. “Any action other than the one you took would have resulted in Sam’s death.”

“One second?” Dean queried, eyes widening in shock.

“Literally.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Gabriel has told me all about his ‘Tardis bubble’. He said Castiel arrived with less than an attosecond to spare. Pretty awesome, Cas. Thanks, man. Seriously.” He grinned appreciatively at the Angel. Who dipped his eyes away, but not before his lips quirked with the semblance of a pleased smile.

“What the fuck’s an attosecond?” Dean demanded.

“Put it this way, it was a whole fuck less time than it would have taken you to hesitate long enough to decide to punch Lilith’s lights out rather than stab her,” Ash said plainly.

“So, like it or not, I _am_ rolling out parade banners,” Sam announced. “Suck it up, Dean. You did good. Have your moral crisis in your own time. Right now, we have another bitch to gank.”

“Well, we’re assuming we do,” Charlie corrected. “It _could_ have gone the other way. Magnus might have killed Abaddon. But I’m reasonably certain she would have gotten the drop on him. His avatar was pretty lifelike, except for him shaving off ten years or so and adding a bit of hair. Abaddon looks _nothing_ like Josie Hoffman. Josie is a fat, middle-aged blonde. Abaddon is a young, slim redhead with cheekbones like knives. Magnus had a real weakness for skinny redheads. I bet Abaddon did a black widow on him and stabbed him in a bedchamber. Hopefully _before _they did the deed, considering Magnus was her step-son.”

“Uggg,” Sam grimaced, his whiskers twitching with distaste. “Not a picture I wanted in my head.”

“Not a picture _any_ of us wanted in our heads,” Dean agreed. He turned to Charlie, “You told me she had a personal beef with Magnus. Family stuff?”

“Money stuff. Decades of court cases over an inheritance. A lot of bad blood between them. Magnus dying in real life just solved a whole lot of hurt for her.”

“Maybe so, but she had no way of knowing he’d really die, did she?” he argued. “Maybe it was just intended as an act of figurative revenge on her part. Kill his virtual avatar kind of stuff. So she’s not like Lilith or Nick. Doesn’t get her kicks out of hurting people for the sake of it. The fact her motivations were personal makes it _more_ likely she’s a normal, otherwise decent person who just got a bit carried away with the idea of virtual revenge. If she was a _real_ murderess, she would have just hired a real-life hitman to take Magnus out,” Dean pointed out reasonably. “So I have a good feeling about her. I reckon _she_ will listen to me and take the offer to join us.”

“It’s kinda sweet how he always thinks the best of people, until they stab him,” Charlie said.

“Or stab _me,” _Sam pointed out grumpily.

_“_If she even _looks_ at you the wrong way I’ll end her,” Dean snarled. “In fact, today you can just stay here today and catch a mouse or something.”

“I don’t think so,” Sam sniffed. “I’m level 205 now, so the situation’s changed completely. I admit I probably _should _have listened to you yesterday, but Gabriel’s fully merged with me now. So I’m coming.” He flashed his eyes for emphasis, letting Gabriel’s golden glare fill them completely.

Dean shrugged in defeat, though he didn’t look happy.

“I am more concerned about _you _today,” Castiel announced, narrowing his eyes and staring at Dean critically. “Your eyes are unusually red. They appear irritated. Did you sleep badly?”

“Allergies,” Dean snapped defensively. “Someone thought it would be a good idea to put a goddamned cat in my bed last night.”

Castiel cocked his head in confusion. “But I recollect it was you who…”

“Is that the time already?” Dean interrupted hurriedly. “Come on. We’ve got a bitch to ga…um, persuade to join us.”

###

Whatever else people said about Crowley and, admittedly, the things they said were rarely positive, the one thing no- one ever accused him of was stupidity.

Underneath his usual cloak of well-padded flesh and designer suit, the skinny Glaswegian gutter rat always lurked close to the surface, sharp-eyed and suspicious. Underneath his overly-confident veneers, the rat’s broken teeth remained snarled with caution. Ready to snap, to bite, just as the rat’s eyes constantly sought every exit, every escape route, every potential trap.

Beneath Crowley’s mask of bonhomie, the rat remained persistently on guard and poised, always, to sniff out treachery.

So, although Crowley lacked the insider knowledge that Dean was privy to and was, obviously, unaware of just a huge pile of shit he had stepped into, he was well aware that something hugely significant had ‘gone wrong’ within Moondoor.

The very first thing he did, when he logged in that morning and saw his available lives had reduced to _one,_ had been to attempt to log right back out again. It was instinct, second nature, to hit an unexpected crisis and immediately search for a way out.

So he was well-aware the log-out icon was missing entirely from his inventory. As were his tech support icons and PM’s. He was stuck in-game, with no ability to log out and no way to contact anyone to complain or put it right.

Another player might have assumed a momentary glitch with the game protocols caused by the events update done the previous night. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the Devs had caused major in-game glitches when trying to load an events package.

Crowley, though, preferred a default setting of pessimism. That way, he liked to say, if it turned out he was wrong, he would at least have the compensation of something _good_ happening. Crowley thought optimists were idiots who just constantly set themselves up for disappointment.

So Crowley made the decision to believe his missing icons were not an _accident. _They, and his missing lives, had been removed _deliberately_. He didn’t know why, but it was reasonable, he decided, to assume the intention was to bring the whole Knights of Hell clusterfuck to a much faster conclusion. Of course, a heads-up would have been _nice._ It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a life to get back to. Okay, not a _great_ life, but money had a way of smoothing over life’s minor disappointments and the one thing Crowley’s life gave him in spades was money. So what if people considered the way he got that money to be sleazy? None of his ex-wives, for all their pontificating about his lack of morals, had ever turned their noses up at having that dirty money in their divorce settlements.

Money he _wasn’t _making whilst playing this damned game. He had met the original suggestion it could take as much as a year for all the knights to run out of lives with total horror. But, he supposed, some of the other knights might have been the kind of losers who had nothing better to do than play games all day for a living.

His original plan had been to get the job done as fast as physically possible and get back to running his empire. Which, okay, hadn’t worked out that well due to that damned twink but, even so, he was all for _anything_ that got him out of Moondoor faster.

So this development should have felt like a good thing.

It didn’t.

The little Glaswegian gutter rat inside him was squealing like a stuck pig in his ear that this was a bad, bad, bad, BAD thing.

He knew enough about the immersion tanks to reason he could be safely trapped inside the game for several weeks without his physical body coming to any permanent harm, but the rat under his skin was still yelling ‘Danger, Will Robinson’ as though he was in actual _real_ danger.

And Crowley didn’t like it. Didn’t like it one bit. Because he hadn’t survived the Gorbals by ignoring that voice. Hadn’t been one of the only few to escape because he’d ever turned left when that voice demanded he turn right,

So although Crowley didn’t _know_ he was now literally fighting for his life, had no way of knowing that to be a fact rather than simply a feeling, he adjusted his behavior accordingly anyway.

He decided to stop pissing about and make sure he damned well won the game.

And he knew exactly where to start.

Three days earlier he’d spotted some asshole with a telltale sigil on his arm in the next town but one. The moron hadn’t even been trying to conceal it from view. So this guy, Asmodeus, was either still in Stangru or hadn’t traveled far. Crowley had left him alone at the time since the guy still had eight lives so wasn’t worth the effort. He had merely made a careful note of what he looked like, then had moved on before Asmodeus had even noticed him. The element of surprise could never be over-valued.

Now though, well now a little trip to Stangru sounded like a perfect idea.

###

They ported directly inside Ravensclaw and landed in the market square, fortunately without landing on top of any unsuspecting NPC’s.

“Any demonic activity here?” Dean asked Ash.

Ash cast a low-level scrying spell and shook his head. “Nothing significant. I’m picking up Abaddon herself, or maybe Magnus, because there’s definitely another rank 2 Demonic _Boss _here, but I’m not registering any other demons.

Dean smirked at Charlie. “Told ya,” he said. “Just because she’s a Knight doesn’t automatically make her a bad guy.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said. “But, assuming it _is_ Abaddon, I never got the opportunity to check what level she’d reached before hitting 200. But since Magnus was level 70 and she didn’t have the benefit of a war party, it’s fair to assume she must have been pretty much the same level and she didn’t get there by making nice with people.”

“Still, I see where Dean is coming from,” Ash interrupted. “Even if she’s spent the last fortnight ganking NPC’s and players left, right and center, there’s a huge difference between _that_ and deliberately killing a real-life person. Maybe she’s shit hot at playing Moondoor as a game. That doesn’t necessarily make her a homicidal bitch in real life.”

“I thought Cain picked all of the Knights based on the fact they _were_ all assholes,” Sam pointed out.

“Yes. However, Cain’s understanding of human nature is likely to be flawed,” Castiel said. “In my experience, humans are unpredictable, chaotic and prone to act in illogical ways. I am frequently surprised by irrational human behavior.”

Dean narrowed his eyes at the Angel, pretty sure Cas was making a dig at him specifically. Castiel just blinked at him, his eyes huge and innocent. Which was, pretty much, confirmation of his suspicions. Irrational? He’d give him ‘irrational’.

He reached into his inventory and withdrew Meg.

She landed in front of him, saw the lack of an inverted devil’s trap, her eyes glinted with wicked humor and then…

“What the fuck happened to you?” she demanded. “Jeez. How the fuck are you so BIG? How fucking long was I stuffed in your purse?”

“Lilith,” he explained to her, shortly.

She looked both impressed and confused. “And killing her instantly turned you into a _demonic_ boss?”

“Apparently so.”

She frowned. “So, what’s this? Don’t need me any more so you’re cutting me loose? Fucking typical.”

“Nope,” he said. “I find myself, as Cas would say, ‘in possession of an unfortunate amount of soul points’. Need to get rid of them. So I figured I’d hire you for a few days to burn ‘em off.”

“How many SP points? ‘Cos it would cost a bomb to buy my _exclusivity_ because I don’t see any point agreeing to it if some other bastard can still summon me at will.”

“I need to get rid of at least 20,000. The way things are going, I might end up with more. Should be more than enough to hire one tiny level 50 demon for a few days though.”

Meg sneered. “You weren’t calling me tiny yesterday,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, well, things have changed,” he smirked. But then he sobered and shrugged. “Honestly, levels aside, I’m not discounting your value as a fighter any more than I’d disrespect Charlie or Ash. I’m just talking about the game mechanic cost of a level 50 demon. So here’s the deal. I hire your time until I run out of SP. In return you, well, I’d like it if you joined us and helped but I’m not going to _make_ you do anything. Just stand on the sidelines and throw snarky comments if you prefer. Or fuck off and go shoe-shopping or whatever the hell demons do when they’re off the clock. Just burning up my SP is fair exchange for you getting a few days’ vacation.”

“Seriously?” She demanded. “You’re going to buy 20k’s worth of my time and just let me go _shopping?”_

“If you want,” he agreed easily.

“Do I look like the kind of girl who goes _shopping?”_ she demanded incredulously.

“Maybe that’s exactly why you _should_ go shopping,” Sam suggested, with a shit-eating smirk.

“Fuck off, fleabag,” Meg snapped.

Sam hacked, as though he was about to emit a furball, but what actually came out of his mouth was “Level 205, bitch. Lap it up and choke on it.”

“Fuck me,” Meg said, eyes huge. “And, you, Clarence. Level 246? Really? What the hell are you lot eating for breakfast? This is getting to be real serious shit, isn’t it? Gotta say, I never thought you boys had a hope in hell but, dunno, maybe you lot might pull this off.”

“So you’ll help us?” Dean asked.

She shrugged nonchalantly. “I’ll take the deal,” she said. “Whether or not I help you, well, I’ll see how I feel when a situation arises.” She raised an eyebrow in challenge.

“Okay. Fair enough. Deal,” Dean agreed.

“I don’t get it,” Charlie said to Ash. “It wouldn’t have cost any more SP to _make_ her help us.”

“Dean wouldn’t be Dean if he was in the habit of _making_ people follow him,” Ash replied. “Which is probably why we _do_ all follow him.”

“Because he _is_ righteous, despite his points situation,” Castiel said, approvingly, though his head was cocked at an angle as he stared at Dean with a thoughtful expression.

And Dean tried not to smirk with satisfaction at having so easily solved the SP problem by himself.

Unlike Lilith, they didn’t have to fight through a demonic hoard _or _run the gauntlet of a band of overeager NPC town guards to find Abaddon. Finding her was as easy as following Ash’s scrying spell through the market place until they reached a very familiar-looking public house named ‘The Slaughtered Lamb’.

“Told you it was just a standard game template,” Ash muttered to Dean as they entered. “I bet there’s one in most NPC towns.”

“As long as werewolves aren’t a standard preset,” Dean replied.

“Werewolves?” Sam demanded, the fur surging up on his back to form an alarmed Mohican. “Where?”

“Not here,” Dean assured him. “Well not that I know of. The name of the pub is from… you know what? Never mind.”

Inside the bar, there were no werewolves.

The interior was completely deserted except for a single individual.

A stunningly attractive red-haired, pale-skinned woman whose profile announced she was level 200.

Though, honestly, the fact her eyes were solid black would have given that fact away even without the helpful clue from the game engine. Eyes that skipped over them all thoughtfully, appearing to carefully weigh and measure their threat levels, before her attention returned to Castiel and her smile was brittle as she said, “Looking for me, boys?”

“We came here specifically to find you,” Castiel agreed solemnly. “My companions and I wish to discuss matters relating to the Knights of Hell.”

“I just bet you do,” she said. “Though I can’t for the life of me figure out which one of you is the one here to kill me. I mean, _you’re_ the highest rank, so it might be you, but you don’t _smell_ like a demon to me. So that leaves the Twink or the cat. Neither really grabbing me as likely prospects either.”

“What the fuck is it with everyone calling me a Twink?” Dean snarled. His eyes flashed black.

“Ah. Not the cat then,” Abaddon purred. “Shame really. Don’t particularly like cats.”

“Surprising,” Meg snarled, moving (to everyone’s surprise) into a defensive position in front of Sam. “Thought cats were a witch thing. Oh… maybe I meant ‘Bitch’. Always get those two mixed up.”

“Definitely a shame to mess up such a pretty face though,” Abaddon continued, ignoring Meg completely, her attention fully on Dean now. “Still, you’re probably _really _a fat, bald, acne-ridden loser who lives in his mom’s basement, so I won’t feel too bad about it.”

“Um, sadly, this is really my face,” Dean admitted.

“Yeah,” Ash agreed. “It’s a burden he lives with 24/7.”

“We’re considering therapy for him,” Charlie said. “Oh, and _my_ red hair is real too. Just so you know. In fact, the only one with a fake avatar in this room is you, honeybunch.”

Sam hacked a cough, “and me.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dean hissed. “What exactly don’t you understand about the word ‘incognito’?”

“Oh, yeah, and the cat,” Charlie agreed loudly, to drown out Dean’s words. “But Sabriel really _is _young enough to get acne, so we try not to use that word if we can help it.” She winked pointedly when Sam gave a snarl of offense. “He gets sensitive and sheds a lot.”

“Nobody is here to kill you,” Castiel announced firmly. “We are here to discuss the ‘program glitch’ that has trapped us all within the game. It occurred to us that you might be unaware of the full implications of Moondoor’s current issues. Which is why my opening statement was precisely true. There are simply matters we wish to discuss.”

“Does he always talk like he has a stick up his ass?” Abaddon asked Dean conversationally.

“Usually,” Dean agreed. _When he’s not lying like a boss,_ he added silently. “But he’s right. We’re just here to talk.”

Since she was alone and faced with a group of people of considerable strength, three of whom were higher levels than herself, he had to admire the way she kept her composure as she said, airily, “Fine. Take seats and talk. I have all day, apparently. I’m assuming the game won’t reset before midnight.”

“That’s the thing, Josie,” Charlie said. “It’s not going to reset _at all.”_

For the first time, Abaddon looked scared. She lurched to her feet, “How the hell do you know my real name?” she demanded.

“Sit back down and I’ll tell you,” Charlie replied, not even flinching at being face to face with a scared, angry rank 2 demonic boss. “Spell the door, Ash,” she added over her shoulder. “This is going to take some time and I don’t want anyone walking in on us.”

###


	72. A total clusterfuck

Abaddon was silent for a long time, her eyes narrowed with suspicion as she looked from face to face. Then she brightened a little. “So you’re saying that Magnus is dead? For real?”

“To the best of our knowledge,” Charlie agreed. “We can confirm it absolutely when Ash logs out of the game and talks to a friend of ours. He’s got an FBI guy on speed-dial who’s ready to go check on immersion tank players whenever we give the heads up that we think they’ve bought the farm.”

“Well, that just made this shitty day one hell of a lot better,” Abaddon announced. “I was hoping it would at least give him a heart attack considering his genetic predisposition but, honestly, even that was just kind of vague wishful thinking on my part.”

Dean flinched a little at the look of supreme satisfaction on her face. “So, um, I get that you had a personal issue with him. So hopefully you looking so damned self-satisfied is kinda understandable. Question is, what’s your position on murder in general?”

She stared at him thoughtfully for a long moment, then smiled wryly. “You’re very young and idealistic, aren’t you? It’s kind of sweet, I suppose. But naïve. I’ll be totally honest with you, though you might not like what I have to say. I’m not religious. I don’t believe in crap like heaven. We only get one life and,” she shrugged, “I have no intention of letting that life get cut short. So if the stakes really _are_ real now, then if someone gets in my way or puts me in danger? They’re fair game. Better I survive than they do.

“Having said that, I don’t want to spend the rest of that life behind bars if I can help it. Way I see it, when all this shit is over and done with, and there’s a bunch of dead bodies lying in immersion tanks, people like your FBI friend are going to be crawling through the game logs looking for people to blame for whatever’s gone down. I sure as shit don’t want those fingers pointing at _me_. So if I kill _anyone_ else, I’ll be damned sure anyone investigating will agree it was an act of self-defense.”

Sam glared at her with evident dislike then sniffed the air pointedly as if he’d smelt something offensive, but he said nothing. Gabriel, on the other hand, flared Sam’s eyes gold before saying, “Pragmatism is as good a reason as any to join us. Couple of FBI folks already know we’re the ‘good guys’ just trying to save the day here. If you’re worried about legal ramifications back in the real world, you’re better off throwing your hat into _our_ ring. Particularly since you _did _just off your step-son.”

“The cat’s got a point,” Meg agreed, as she sat idly using the tip of her knife to clean her fingernails. “I’m all for the pragmatic approach too. I know these losers come across as a bunch of idealistic idiots but I’m still pretty sure they’re the least bad of some seriously poor options.”

“Least bad?” Charlie challenged incredulously. “That’s the best you’ve got to say?”

Meg shrugged. “Best _you’re_ gonna get.”

“Fine, whatever,” Charlie snapped. “Question is, are you with us or not, Josie?”

Abaddon considered for a moment, then said, “Yes and no.”

“Which means?” Castiel growled, his eyes flaring dangerously as he took a protective step closer to Dean.

Which, well, both pissed Dean off and also made his stomach flutter a little.

“That I’ll work _with_ you to get out of this shit alive,” Abaddon offered. “But I’m not joining your stupid ‘war party’. Way I figure it, giving you 20 levels means I _drop_ 20 levels and fuck _that_. For all I know this is just some stupid trick to make me drop beneath you enough for you to take me out,” she told Dean.

“With the war party I’m _already_ nearly 50 levels higher than you,” Dean pointed out. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

Abaddon snarled, her eyes flashing and her sigil blazing with sudden fire. “Wanna give it a go, Twink-boy?”

“Bring it on,” Dean retorted, reaching for his own blade.

“Touch him and I’ll smite you myself,” Castiel growled, stepping between them.

“Um… guys…” Ash interrupted. “If you could all stop your pissing contest for a moment, I think we’ve got a problem.”

“What’s up,” Dean demanded.

“Demons. A whole shitload of them. They just turned up outside. The spell I’ve got on the door would hold back a few, maybe. But I can sense several dozen of the bastards out there.”

Dean’s eyes went black as he reached out mentally to sense them himself through his sigil. “Fuck,” he snarled. “You’re right and they aren’t under control. I’m just getting an impression of intense violent chaos.” He turned to Meg. “Can you take them over? Make them obey you?”

“No more than you can, _boss _man,” she retorted. “If there were less of them, sure, but a huge already-summoned mob like this? No chance.”

“So whoever summoned them clearly isn’t Rank 2 yet,” Abaddon pointed out. “If they’re just a mindless mass, the Knight who’s summoned them is only Rank 1, so he can’t control them himself, and he doesn’t have a lieutenant either because, well, Meg’s _here_.”

“Rank 1 with a fuckton of soul points though,” Dean replied.

“Incoming,” Ash yelped, an instant before the door blew off its hinges in an explosion of wood and a small army of demons began to pour through the door.

And they weren’t _completely_ mindless because, despite being an uncontrolled mob, they still all swarmed directly towards Dean and Abaddon.

Ash frantically cast an illumination spell, just in case, and was rewarded for his efforts when a dozen or so Hell Hounds materialized within the throng.

Dean and Abaddon looked at each other and then, as easily and as smoothly as a rehearsed move, they melded together, back to back, both withdrawing their bone daggers with twin, black-eyed looks of determination as the demons swarmed towards them in a flood of fury.

Ash stepped back from the mob, remaining near the wall, needing too much of his attention and HP to keep the illumination spell working for him to get involved in the combat too. Castiel moved to position himself between Ash and the demons, swiftly and easily dispatching any that left the main group and headed in Ash’s direction.

Charlie, Benny and Meg moved to the other side of the gathered mob, starting to attack them from behind. Because the strongest of the demons had surged to the front of the pack, the three lowest level players still found themselves easily able to hold their own against the lesser demons they were facing.

Sam was no-where to be seen at all.

They could only hope his cat instincts had taken over when the door exploded and had caused him to race for safety.

“This is a lot more entertaining than I would have expected,” Abaddon panted breathlessly, as she fought with Dean, back to back. “I haven’t had this much fun in _years._”

“Lady, you need to seriously re-examine your life if that’s true,” Dean snorted, though he too was finding the combat more reminiscent of a heavy exercise session than a serious, life-threatening situation. How things had changed, he thought to himself. Less than a week earlier, the same levels of demons in Crowley’s dungeon run had been terrifyingly dangerous. Although the Hell Hounds were still problematic because of their size and speed, so he thanked god that Ash had made them visible.

“I think I do,” she agreed, with a careless laugh. “But it’s weird, isn’t it? How it's only facing real danger that _truly_ makes you feel alive.”

Abruptly, all the Hell Hounds broke off from the melee and raced together to the far end of the room.

At first, Dean was too grateful for their departure to worry about _why_ they had broken off from the main fight. It was far easier to deal with human-sized opponents _or _hounds. Mixed together, they were far more difficult to handle because sweeping his dagger downwards to strike the Hell Hounds left his head and shoulders exposed to the knives and swords of the demons. But then there was a sharp sound of breaking glass over by the bar area. Dean glanced over and saw Sam had leaped up onto the top shelf behind the bar, where all the most expensive liquor bottles were stored on a series of racks, and he was now maybe eight or nine feet off the ground. Slavering beneath him were the entire pack of Hell Hounds, all barking and snarling rabidly as they raised themselves on their back paws and attempted to scramble upwards. The Hounds were huge enough on four legs; on two legs they stood almost the height of a normal man.

Which was still more than a couple of feet short of the height of the top shelf, so even though the Hounds were going wild, jumping and leaping high in their efforts to reach Sam, their jaws were snapping shut several inches lower than the shelf where Sam was sitting.

Their failure to achieve anything didn’t seem to deter the Hounds’ efforts. If anything, the longer they failed, the more frantic they became. It seemed, Hell Hounds or not, dogs were dogs and cats were cats and the hell beasts had completely forgotten whatever orders they’d been vaguely following and now were mindlessly intent on reaching his feline-shaped brother instead.

Gabriel’s presence inside Sam’s head didn’t offer Dean much comfort. Whatever goddamned level ‘Sabriel’ was, courtesy of the onboard Angel, he was still just 9lbs of cat facing a dozen Hell Hounds the size of mastiffs, which was a recipe for disaster that Dean was certain would inevitably end in Sam getting ripped to shreds by the beasts.

Except, Sam didn’t seem particularly bothered.

His fur wasn’t even doing the usual pointy Mohican thing.

Several feet higher than any of the Hounds could reach, Sam simply stared down with the kind of total disdain only a cat could portray; his golden eyes narrowed with irritation rather than huge with fear. Then he slowly stood up and _sauntered_ along the shelf, tail high in the air, pausing at each full bottle just long enough to reach out a paw and, with a completely un-catlike strength, hook the liquor off the shelf to crash down on top of the Hounds.

Either the Hell Hounds were too stupid to duck or Sam’s aim was infallible, because each bottle impacted one of the beasts hard enough to cause a loud yelp of pain to accompany the sound of shattering glass. The Hounds, and the bar floor, were soon covered in shards of glass and soaked in liquor.

Sam, though, was running out of ammunition and none of the Hell Hounds, for all their whimpers as glass shards embedded into their heads and the pads of their paws, were injured enough to stop their dogged attempts to reach him.

Unless someone got over there soon to help, Sam was going to be toast because the building was timber-framed and not built to withstand the assault of a dozen rabid dogs the size of small ponies.

Both Charlie and Meg, nearer to the bar area than Dean, had also noticed the problem and were trying to get to the rear of the room to assist, but they were making slow progress through the hordes of lesser demons and the entire back wall was shaking so hard from the impact of the Hounds smashing against it that Dean feared the shelf Sam was on might come crashing down before they got there to help.

‘Fuck,’ he swore, redoubling his own efforts to cut a path through the demons who had them surrounded like a rugby scrum. Abaddon kept pace with him, still remaining glued to his back, covering him as he pushed forward.

And then Sam sat down again and started to casually wash himself as though he hadn’t got a care in the world.

“What the fuck?” Dean snapped, almost all of his attention on Sam although the sigil was blazing on his arm and somehow enabling him to simultaneously continue slaughtering the demons around him.

Except, he realized, that _wasn’t_ what Sam was doing. Sure, he’d lifted one tiny ginger paw to his face and opened his mouth as though he was intending to lick it, but what he _actually _did was simply blow on his paw, an emission of breath as golden as the unnatural glow of his eyes and at the tip of his tiny paw, somehow, a tiny flame flickered to life.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathed as, with deliberate nonchalance, Sam stared at the flame, looked down on the Hounds, looked back at the flame, wriggled his hips, banged his tail a couple of times, then took a deep gulp of air and then _blew_ it out towards his paw.

The tiny flame flickered, then roared to life, exploding outwards and downwards like a flame thrower. An arc of perfect gold, soaring from Sam’s paw directly onto the head of one of the Hounds.

It took a moment to catch, a brief pause as the flame hit the dark flesh of the Hound and then seemed to just hang there for a moment like a halo over its head, before, with a loud WHOOOMMPPHH, the flame erupted and raced from beast to beast, growing into a near inferno as several gallons of 100 proof bourbon ignited simultaneously to a chorus of agonized howls.

Forget ‘Slaughtered Lamb’. Within seconds, the bar needed to be renamed ‘Barbequed Puppy’.

“Holy shit”, Dean muttered. He wasn’t sure how much had been Sam’s idea and how much had been Gabriel’s but, either way, _Sabriel_ was one baddass little motherfucker.

The fact the flame had come out of Sam’s paw had been a clue it wasn’t a purely _natural_ phenomenon. The fact it immolated the Hounds and then poofed out of existence altogether was a second clue. But, Dean reasoned, at least it meant the rest of the building wasn’t going to go up in flames too. So that was one less worry to deal with and, with the Hell Hounds gone, Ash no longer had to work to cast a spell over the room to make them visible so he was finally free to join in the general fight.

Not that there was much left to do.

The floor was littered with demonic body parts (though at least those gruesome souvenirs all disappeared as Castiel moved through all the wounded demons, smiting them back to Purgatory) as Dean and Abaddon drove them backward with the vicious scything of their daggers. Charlie, Meg and Benny, having already handled the lesser demons, were taking out the few remaining demons from the rear, shamelessly stabbing them in the back as they pressed against the rapidly reducing scrum of demons surrounding the two Knights.

Less than five minutes after the Hounds exploded in angelic fire, the rest of the demons were back in purgatory too.

“Is that it?” Dean asked, looking around the now empty room with exhausted disbelief. “They’re all gone?”

“Every single one of the bastards,” Charlie agreed, smirking with satisfaction. “We all kicked butt.”

Someone clapped, slow and sarcastic.

Dean turned towards the noise, the source of which came from the direction of the destroyed doorway, and his heart stuttered in his chest.

Sam Winchester was standing where the door used to exist.

Six foot four of long-haired muscle dressed in some ridiculous tight leather BDSM-type outfit that left his arms bare to showcase not only his impressive biceps but also the red pulsing glow from his active Mark of Cain.

He was clapping, his handsome face twisted into a sneer of derision, and his eyes, for all they were the same soulful deep hazel Dean knew so well, were somehow flinty and cold.

It was Sam.

But it most certainly was _not_ his brother.

“Well, helloooo,” Meg purred, as she took in the sight of Dean’s not-so-little sibling. “And who the hell are you, sugarlips? Sam the Justice Bringer. I like the sound of that. Ooooh, level 250. It’s obviously my day to be surrounded by _big_ boys. And, you know how it is… size matters to a gal like me.”

Dean honestly didn’t know whether Meg was being serious or sarcastic. Though he was grateful for her stepping forward to gain Cain’s full attention so he could take a minute to get over the shock of seeing him. It was one thing to _know_ Cain’s avatar was based on Sam; another entirely to witness it in the flesh and realize that _somehow_ he was going to have to fight, and kill, someone wearing Sam’s face.

“What’s a pretty demoness like you doing with these losers?” Cain asked smoothly, his mouth splitting into a wide, dimpled smile. “Looks like you’ve hitched your horse to the wrong wagon, honey, but that’s okay. Not too late to change your mind and get with the winning side.”

“Here’s your chance,” Charlie said, sliding over to Dean whilst Cain was distracted by Meg. “He’s only level 250 and still a rank 1 boss. You’re pretty even-stevens at the minute. Pretty sure you’ve got the edge, actually, being a rank 2, Take him out now and it’s over.” She turned to look at Abaddon. “This is it, Josie. Join the war party _now. _That will take Dean to 269. He can beat Cain easily and we can all go home.”

Abaddon looked unconvinced, glancing between Cain and Dean. “It’s not enough difference levels-wise to guarantee a victory,” she argued. “I mean, look at the SIZE of him.”

“That’s _exactly_ why this will work,” Charlie said. “Cain isn’t used to being in such a large vessel. He’s going to be clumsy until he adjusts to it. Until Friday he was inside a vessel several inches shorter and a heck of a lot skinnier. And Sam’s got a ‘gym’ body. Those aren’t _real_ muscles anyway.”

“They look pretty damned _real _to me,” Abaddon said, her eyes glinting with fearful appreciation of ‘Cain’s’ biceps.

“Jeez, put your tongue away. I mean Sam has no idea of how to use those muscles, so his vessel won’t have any muscle-memory to assist Cain in this. The _real _Sam can’t fight his way out of a paper bag. He’s a goddamned _lawyer, _Josie. You _hate _lawyers.”

Abaddon looked like she’d tasted something bad. “What a fucking waste,” she snarled. “But how do you know he’s a lawyer?”

“He’s my brother,” Dean said, looking even sicker than she did.

He didn’t speak particularly loudly yet Cain’s attention swung abruptly in his direction at his words and he stared, long and hard, at Dean.

“YOU’RE Dean Winchester?” he demanded.

“In the flesh. Or not, I guess. In an avatar. But at least it is MY avatar, you body-snatching fucker.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Cain demanded furiously.

“Was about to ask you the same thing.”

“No, fucking goddammit. What the fuck are you doing as a Knight of Hell?” Cain demanded. “You can’t be. There are nine Knights and I picked each and every one of them.”

“Shows what you know,” Dean smirked. “Cos there are _ten_ Knights this time, motherfucker, and this one is gonna kick your ass.”

“How? Who?” Cain demanded, but then, before anyone could reply, his face twisted into furious understanding. “Chuck. It was that fucker Chuck, wasn’t it? Fucking goddamnit. He did it on purpose, didn’t he? Yeah. Makes sense. Fucking tried to halve my options by setting me up to kill you.”

“What?” Dean asked, nonplussed by Cain’s comment.

Cain shrugged. “Heir and a spare. You’re just the _very_ unwanted spare, in case you were wondering. I sure as hell don’t _want_ to end up in your crippled husk of a body but, well, better to leave the option open, don’t you think?”

“Huh?”

“I forgot you were the dumb one,” Cain mocked. “Which actually makes you a little bit _more_ attractive to tell the truth. So in the highly unlikely event of my people failing to get Sam into the game and inside this vessel before I need to log out, _you’re_ my Uber home. So put that knife away before you cut yourself. I’m not here for _you. _My date’s with red there.”

Meg’s eyes went huge and then narrowed with speculation. She glanced pointedly in the direction of the _real _Sam and Dean could practically see the gears shifting inside her head as she presumably figured it out.

But she didn’t _say _anything.

She just looked peculiarly smug.

“Abaddon’s with us,” Dean said staunchly. “So you want _her, _you’ve gotta come through me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cain sneered. “Walk away. I don’t need a tenth Knight to get this shit done, so just fuck off while you still have the chance. You think you can take me on because you think we’re about the same strength? You think you’ve got a chance of beating me? I already think you’re a moron. Don’t feel the need to prove it to me. Do you _honestly _believe you’re capable of sticking a knife in _this _body? _Sam’s _body? You honestly think you can kill your own _brother?”_

Dean swallowed hard but squared his shoulders and glared at Cain. “I don’t care what you look like. It’s all smoke and fucking mirrors. You’re not Sam. You’re not my brother. And when I stick my dagger in your heart, Sam will be the _first_ person ready to throw a parade in my honor. So fuck you.”

“Join the war party, Josie,” Charlie urged. “Help Dean now and it will be over.”

“No way,” Abaddon spat. “That’ll drop me to level 180 for the duration. I won’t stand a chance against a level 250.”

“You won’t stand a chance against him as a level 200,” Charlie pointed out. “Besides, you won’t have to fight him at all. Add yourself to the war party and Dean will handle Cain by himself.”

“How stupid do you think I am?” Abaddon replied. “What’s to stop Dean from killing me afterward? How do I know that wasn’t the plan all along? I’ve just done the math. Kill Cain _and _me and Dean hits rank five and gets a First Blade. That makes a fuck more sense as a scenario than all this ‘let’s work together’ shit. You’re all just playing me, aren’t you?” she accused.

Dean turned to glare at her incredulously. “Really? That’s what you’re taking from this?”

Abaddon sneered at him. “I’ve never met a man who didn’t use me, then throw me away like garbage once they got what they wanted from me. Why the fuck should I believe you’re any different?”

Dean stared at her incredulously for a moment, then shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. Stay out of it. I don’t need your levels anyway. I can handle this myself.”

He turned back to face Cain. “Let’s dance,” he said.

For just a brief but satisfying instant he saw ‘Sam’s’ eyes flicker with uncertainty, with alarm even, and he realized Cain had just been trying to fake him out, that Cain was pretty certain that he _was _more than a match for him with only one level between them and with Cain being in such an unfamiliar vessel. 

Cain was _afraid _of him.

Cain was actually _afraid._

He took one step forward, and then he staggered as Abaddon’s dagger plunged into his exposed back, seeming to penetrate a lung since he immediately struggled to even breathe. The pain was excruciating and he dropped to one knee even as he half-turned to gasp “Why?”

She shrugged, half gleeful, half apologetic. “Like I said, I just did the math. Kill you and I’m rank 4. Then kill _him,”_ she said, nodding at Cain, “and _I _get a first blade. So, turns out, I don’t need your help. I just need you to die. Sorry,” she added, oddly sincere. “But I learned a long time ago that I was the only person who was ever going to put _my_ needs first.”

Abaddon tightened her grip on the dagger, ready to twist her wrist, ready to turn the blade in Dean’s body and rip it upwards through his heart… and several things happened at once.

Or not, since actually several things had been happening since the moment she’d pulled her dagger to stab him so, really, it was just a coalescence of those things that happened next:

Twenty-six feet away on a high shelf above a burned and glass splattered bar, Sam saw the white glint of the bone-dagger in Abaddon’s hand and opened his mouth to yowl a warning. Gabriel, far more experienced at fighting and so aware that it was too late for a shout to be anything other than an additional distraction to Dean, decided more radical action was required. In the brief moment he found himself cursing the fact he was in the body of something as useless as a cat rather than something like a bird that could _fly_ to Dean’s aid, the thought struck Gabriel that _Castiel_ hadn’t been constrained by his vessel not having wings, had he? Cassie had simply _believed_ he could fly and so he _had_ been able to. And Gabriel was a goddamned archangel, not just a Seraph, so he _had_ to be able to do as much, if not more, than Castiel could do.

Between one second and the next, thought became reality. Huge rose-gold wings spouted over Sam’s body, until he looked like a tiny griffin, and he crouched low before leaping towards Abaddon, his paws, claws-extended, outstretched like talons, his wings forming into a V-shape as he plummeted towards her head like a hawk dropping down to catch a rabbit.

Despite Gabriel’s speed of both thought and action, Sam arrived _after_ the blade had struck, late enough for Abaddon to have wasted some precious seconds _monologuing _like a villain instead of following through with her initial attack, but still, fortunately, before she moved to complete her treachery.

He landed on her with enough momentum to knock her backward, his front claws tangling into her hair, his back claws raking at her face as he scrambled to envelop her whole head with 9lb’s of furious feline. Reacting in panic, in pain, in bewildered horror, she released the dagger without even thinking, too intent on clawing at _his _body with both hands as she tried to remove him.

Several seconds _before_ Sam enacted his impression of an alien face-hugger, Castiel saw Dean stumble and drop to one knee and understood, with sudden horrifying clarity, that Abaddon had struck him from behind. His eyes blazed blue and his wings, solid, huge, flared out of his body so violently that both Cain and Ash were bowled off their feet as they were struck by the darkly sparkling appendages. Ash, further away, only got bitch-slapped by the edge of Castiel’s primaries. Although it was sufficient to knock the Mage into a wall with bruising force, the blow was more a shock than truly injurious. 

Cain, though, received a full face of secondaries, unfurling at over sixty mph, and the impact struck him hard enough to sweep him off his feet. He fell backward, toppling like a tree, his head hitting the ground outside the door with enough force to momentarily cause a galaxy of bright lights to spark behind his eyes. He didn’t actually pass out but it still took several moments for him to regain enough sense and balance to groggily stand up again.

During those moments, Castiel flew to Dean, completely ignoring everyone else, arriving even as Abaddon was staggering backward with a face full of cat. His eyes, blazing cerulean fire met Dean’s eyes, demonically black but filled with pain.

“Sorry, Cas. I fucked up,” Dean gasped, through blue lips. “Bitch ganked me. I just… just…” But whatever he was trying to say was lost as he doubled over, wheezing for breath.

Castiel didn’t hesitate. The healing was _in_ him. He knew that now. Believed it utterly.

And believing made it so.

Even as his left arm reached to carefully remove the blade from Dean’s back, his right hand was glowing as it pressed against the wound, a searing cold fire that suffused Dean’s skin and burned a cleansing, healing path as it raced through Dean’s avatar, knitting the code back together again.

But it wasn’t without cost. Even as he saw color returning to Dean’s face, as he saw the wound closing, even as he imagined Dean’s health bar steadily rising back to full, Castiel felt his own knees weakening, noted his _own_ health bar dropping. It was an exchange, he realized. He wasn’t _creating_ the Health, he was just, somehow, transferring it from himself into Dean.

As his own bar dropped, 90, 80, 70, 60, he started worrying he might not even have enough currency for this transaction.

Then, suddenly, Dean’s hand was around his right wrist, squeezing strongly, attempting to push his hand away. “It’s enough, Cas. Stop it. It’s enough. I can handle it from here. I can regenerate the rest myself.”

It wasn’t the words that broke through to him, but the power, the strength with which they were spoken. Dean was no longer struggling to breathe. His lungs were repaired. His bleeding had stopped and, though Castiel would have preferred to continue until the closed yet still angry-looking wound had disappeared completely, he understood the sense of Dean’s words. They still had both Cain and Abaddon to deal with. Two foes. So they _both_ needed to be capable of fighting.

“You take the bitch,” Dean said firmly. “Cain’s mine.”

Castiel nodded and stepped back, swirling to face Abaddon just as she finally managed to wrench Sam off her face and dash him furiously down onto the floor with the full strength of her 200 levels.

Sam landed with a sickening sound of shattering bones and he yowled with pain. Without her dagger to stab him with, Abaddon smirked and improvised. Her hair was hanging around her face in messy rat-tails and her forehead and cheeks were smeared with blood where the cat’s claws had sliced through her skin, but she still looked smugly satisfied as she raised a booted foot, obviously preparing to stamp it down on Sam’s head.

Meg dove from no-where, hurtling like a cannon-ball towards the tiny cat, snatching it up in her hands and rolling away just in time for Abaddon’s foot to hit nothing more than empty floorboards.

And then Castiel was there, his right arm reaching out to close his fist around Abaddon’s neck and tightening in a grip so constricting that her eyes bulged. Her hands frantically clawed at his arm but he just shook her like a rat, his eyes blazing with merciless fury.

“You can’t kill me,” she gasped, her voice emerging breathy and hoarse, “If _you_ kill me, _Dean _can’t ever win my levels. And you’ll go to jail. I’m not fighting _you_. I’m unarmed. So if you kill me, it’s murder. The FBI will see this log file. They’ll know you murdered me.” And, even with her eyes almost popping out of her head with the pressure of his grip, she still managed to look smug.

Castiel sneered at her. “Dean doesn’t _want_ your levels. We told you, repeatedly, Dean doesn’t want to WIN. He just wants to stop Cain winning. Me killing you on the other hand? That stops _Cain_, so…” and he shrugged. “Oh, and I’m not human, in case you hadn’t noticed, so the FBI? Not really my problem.”

Dean, meanwhile, dove forwards towards Cain, who had only just regained his feet and begun staggering back through the doorway.

Bone dagger in hand (his own bone dagger, since he had already stashed Abaddon’s away in his inventory with Lilith’s) Dean smirked at the man wearing his brother’s face. “I believe this dance is mine?” he suggested.

Cain brought his own blade up and they clashed together. They were far too closely matched for comfort, Sam’s extra height and reach giving Cain an advantage that _almost _compensated for Dean’s greater experience. But only _almost._ Step by step, blow by blow, it was soon obvious that this was a fight Dean was going to win.

They were both panting and huffing, parry met with counter-parry, strike deflected by strike, but slowly, gradually, Cain’s avatar was leaking blood and HP from a dozen wounds whilst Dean, despite still favoring the ache in his back from Abaddon’s attack, managed to avoid every swiping scythe of Cain’s blade. Cain was swinging too wide, over-reaching, forgetting the length of his own arms. The fight was like a ballet performed between a professional and an over-eager amateur and, inevitably, Dean’s greater talent was grinding Cain down.

“Shit, I picked the wrong brother,” Cain spat, as a particularly vicious strike from Dean cut a deep slash across his stomach and blood began to run in rivulets down his legs. “Should have chosen you all along. Didn’t want to get stuck inside a cripple but I should have thought the whole situation through better. Should have picked _you_ for this shit and then tricked Sam into the game to swap bodies again later. In fact, come to think of it, not too late for a change of plans. Like I said, I don’t need _ten_ Knights. I can throw _this_ body away, jump into yours and still walk away from here rank 4 and level 590.”

The statement was so distracting that Dean slipped on the blood-wet floor and barely ducked in time to avoid Cain’s blade. “What do you mean ‘throw it away’?” he demanded, backpedaling a moment to regain his composure.

Cain smirked. “Nick’s dead, of course. The minute I climb out of this avatar, it’ll drop out of the game until it's reactivated by Sam logging in. But it’s just rank 1. Just 100 levels. Not a big loss. Not important enough to worry about. C’est la vie. I think _your_ body’s going to fit me far better. Like a perfect off-the-peg suit.”

“Fuck off,” Dean snarled. “I don’t give _permission_ so you can’t do fuck-all. Chuck explained the rules to me. You V.I.’s can’t take over a body without being invited. Besides, the space is occupied. No vacancies here, buddy.”

“Do you really think I give a fuck about rules?” Cain demanded, laughing with genuine amusement. “Do you honestly believe I spent all those years running RRE without getting someone to write me a loophole? I suggest you tell that piece of amputated angel in your head to move the fuck out, right now because I’m coming in, boy, whether you like it or not and there sure as shit ain’t room for both of us in _your_ tiny brain.”

Dean staggered as a wave of power pulsed up to suffuse Cain’s body and several dark tendrils shot out, like the arms of an octopus, two of them grasping each side of Dean’s head, holding it like a vice, whilst another one snaked forwards and pressed against his face, shoving and pushing, attempting to gain access through his mouth or his eyes. He clenched both his eyes and mouth shut, only to find the pressure shifting towards his nostrils, pushing against them until he felt the sickening sensation of something hot and wet and slimy creeping up inside his nose towards his brain.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, FUCK,” Loki yelled in his head. “I don’t think I can stop him, Dean. I don’t… I’m trying… trying to push back but… he’s too fucking strong, too strong… I can’t….”

Several feet to his left, Castiel was squeezing the last breath out of Abaddon. But, a moment before the light died in Abaddon’s eyes, their black, flat sheen flickered with a lick of blue angelic fire. Just a brief, weak blaze but enough to stop Castiel in his tracks. He loosened his hold slightly, just enough for Abaddon to take a single, wheezing breath, and then her eyes suffused with blue and she gasped, “Castiel. It’s me. Hester. Don’t kill me. Please.”

“Hester,” he choked, his grip loosening further.

“Please Castiel, I know she’s evil but if you kill her, you kill _me_ too. I’m not embedded enough to control her. I’m just her S.I. Break her legs. Hell, break her goddamned neck if you need to. Just don’t actually kill her, please. There might be a way to get me out of here. A way to set me free. Please, Cassie. Please. She killed Gadreel. When she killed Magnus, she killed Gadreel too. I saw it happen. Saw him die. I don’t want to die like that. Please. I just want to be free.”

Stunned, sickened, Castiel released her. He’d forgotten there was one of his brethren trapped inside the vessel. Had actually forgotten that killing Abaddon would sentence one of the host to die too. Hester, his sister. Not that he knew her, not really, she had just been one of the many angels flitting, like himself, through space and time like a moonbeam.

“Hester,” he said, reaching out for her hands.

For a moment, a brief second, her blue eyes flared and a gentle smile played over her lips, and one graceful hand lifted to accept his own.

And then it was Abaddon again. Mouth set in a red slash of fury. Throat darkly bruised. Black eyes filled with both hatred and fear.

As he reached for her, she moved rapidly backward, fleeing him, intent on escape, and tripped over Meg who was still lying on the floor, crouched protectively over Sam. Her momentum sent her staggering sideways, arms flailing, and she fell, her body sprawling gracelessly, out of control.

Cain was grinning, shark-like, with Sam’s even white teeth, as he began to steadily pour himself into Dean. Swirling into his mind, driving Loki backward like a relentless wave, and Sam’s body started to sag, to drop, as more and more of the force that was animating it left that avatar and transferred into Dean’s and then….

Abaddon crashed into Cain, knocking Sam’s avatar backward with enough force that, already dangerously weakened, it staggered and fell backward onto its ass. Cain’s essence, already stretched taut between the two avatars, was pulled almost in two, thinning almost to the point of breaking before it suddenly, self-protectively, snapped back into Sam’s avatar like a retracting elastic band.

Dean stumbled as the invading presence poured back out of his head and he spat furiously, as though that might somehow remove the slimy feel of the _thing _that had tried to rape his mind.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Loki was chanting in a complete panic.

Shaking his head like a wet dog, Dean stared down at where Cain was seated on the floor, Abaddon sprawled over his lap, and, for a moment, both he and Cain both were too stunned to speak.

And then Cain’s mouth curled into a smirk.

“Looks like another change of plan,” he said, with a shrug. “Good job I’m adaptable.”

“Noooooooooooooo,” Dean yelled, as he saw the blade flash, as he saw Cain drag the serrated edge of his dagger across Abaddon’s throat.

Arterial blood spurted out, drenching both him and Cain, but that wasn’t what caused Dean to stumble backward in panic. It was the two hundred levels of power surging out of Abaddon’s body and into Cain’s that made him run backward, reaching out mentally to snatch up Benny and Meg and stuff them in his inventory, to yell “Poughkeepsie” at the top of his voice.

He ran, not so much away from Cain but towards Sam, who was still lying on the floor, wide awake but unable to move his broken legs, but, before Dean covered half the distance, Castiel was there, snatching Sam up, cradling his body, meeting Dean’s eyes before nodding and porting away.

And he waited as Ash and Charlie blinked out, as Cain rose to his feet, his eyes solid black, smiling with triumph, his profile now reading Rank 3 Demonic Boss, player level 490.

“This body is far too strong now to throw away. Shame really, but there it goes. Looks like you lose after all, Dean Winchester. Kill you now, I get the First Blade and then I just need to port around and mop up the rest of the losers. I know the locations of them all. Hell, at this rate, we can all be home for tea. Oh, well, not _you_, since you’ll be _dead_ but, well, thems the breaks. It’s gotta burn, I know. You were soooo close. But you know what they say. Age and experience always wins over youthful enthusiasm. And I know you’re planning to port away, but don’t bother. I’ll just follow you anyway and I have far more ports than you. So why not be a man and just give up gracefully?”

“Yeah? Ya think?” Dean said, feeling sick with disappointment but voice still defiant. “Check your inventory, _loser.”_

A second later, Cain’s smug look was replaced by fury. “What the fuck? What the fuck happened to my ports?” he screeched.

Dean shrugged. “Looks like you’re not the only one around here who can hack the game,” he smirked. “See ya, _loser.”_

And he ported back to the Roadhouse.

They were waiting for him outside, a quiet solemn group. Sam, at least, appeared to have been healed by Castiel again, as he was standing upright at the angel’s feet. It didn’t look like any of them knew what to say.

Dean did though.

“Well, that was a total clusterfuck,” he said, before walking past them and leading the way into the Roadhouse, where several beers with his name on awaited him.


	73. Crowley's Fun Fund

At the exact same time as Dean Winchester was attempting to drown himself inside a barrel of Ellen’s best brand of ‘Hunter’s Helper’, Fergus Roderick MacLeod, who preferred to be known as ‘Crowley’, was also drinking heavily.

His alcoholic consumption was, however, of a far more celebratory nature. It was also considerably more high-end. Whilst Moondoor sadly lacked his preferred indulgence of 30-year-aged Glencraig, for the right price it was possible to obtain a perfectly acceptable alternative and Gold was not something he was lacking any longer because, if asked, Crowley would most certainly not describe _his_ Sunday as having been ‘a clusterfuck’.

Crowley’s Sunday had been _enormously_ satisfying.

By eight pm on Sunday evening, Crowley was a Rank 2 Demonic Boss in possession of 200 power levels, 10 realm ports and enough RSS to keep him in both top-class whiskey and well-pressed Designer Suits for the duration.

It had happened thusly:

Crowley was a great believer in measuring twice, then cutting once. Whilst he was more a proponent of the ‘Art of Treachery’ than the ‘Art of War’, the success of both depended far more on careful planning than it did in execution.

He also prided himself on being a keen student of human behavior. The devil was always in the details. But where he excelled was not only in _noticing_ details that another might miss, but in understanding the most likely _significance _of said details.

Asmodeus, the tosser he’d noticed a few days earlier in Stangru, had been a perfect case in point.

Sure, it would have been perfectly obvious to anyone with half-a-brain that the guy calling himself Asmodeus was a complete twat. The way he had been poncing around with his sleeves rolled up and his Mark of Cain in full view like a flashing neon arrow pointing down over his head saying ‘This is your target’ would have clued _anyone_ into the fact Asmodeus was an over-confident, cocky little knob who needed a good bitch-slap.

The fact he was poncing around in an ice-cream colored suit, with a bolo tie and cowboy boots though, whilst a crime against all good sense, would probably have only caused particular concern or alarm to a fashionista.

Yet it was his _outfit_ that had clued Crowley in to the most pertinent fact about the other knight.

Asmodeus obviously had access to a shit-ton of Gold because he, like all the knights, must have arrived in Purgatory buck-naked. And sure, he could, like Crowley, have subsequently gained enough Gold to clothe and feed himself by ganking NPC’s along the way once he arrived in Moondoor itself but the situation wasn’t _that_ cut and dried. Crowley had managed to clothe himself, almost adequately, primarily because his outfits of choice were always black suits; and black as a color choice and suits as a style were available to purchase in-game as part of the standard Moondoor clothing templates.

Crowley wasn’t used to wearing off-the-peg crap but he could make it work in a pinch and so outfitting himself hadn’t proven onerously expensive. Even so, it had required him lightening the pockets of a _lot_ of NPC’s because, as a rule, those characters didn’t tend to walk about with small fortunes stashed in the money sacks slung at their waists.

An ice-cream colored suit though, well, that was clearly only something available from a Special Designer Template. And, yes, players could gift or swap clothing from their own inventories but only _standard_ clothing or outfits they had won as a prize. Bespoke Designer outfits, on the other hand, could only be purchased directly by the individual player intending to wear them themselves and they took _serious_ Gold to buy. The kind of Gold only available for purchase in player-packs paid for with _real _money. And, given that the Devs were in it to make a profit, there wasn’t enough Gold offered in any single pack to purchase more than one item of Designer clothing. Certainly not enough to buy an entire outfit.

Packs were also only available as limited releases. Every day a different pack was on offer, with a different selection of contents, so the more packs you bought at once, the less valuable their contents. The Dev’s excuse for this was to prevent an individual dropping a huge wad of cash and instantly becoming the number one player. That was bullshit though. The _real_ reason it wasn’t possible to instantly buy everything you needed was that the economy of Moondoor, like that of all other digital games, depended on the idea of ‘hooking’ players in one bite at a time. 

So that told Crowley that Asmodeus was not only ‘cheating’, but doing it big time. Someone else, someone other than a Knight, _must _have purchased several packs on his behalf over a series of days and then transferred the RSS to him in-game.

Crowley was perfectly sanguine about the idea of cheating as a _concept_. If he’d known or trusted any player enough to do the same for him, he certainly wouldn’t have been wearing an off-the-peg suit himself. To be truthful, he found himself rather kicking himself for _not_ having done the same thing. 

So the fact that a plonker like Asmodeus had the foresight to do it would have been a source of considerable irritation to Crowley if not for the fact it opened up a whole world of opportunity.

Because where there were packs, there was not only Gold. There was also the high likelihood of _ports. _And what Crowley wanted, more than anything else in the world right now, was access to realm ports.

Of course, the opportunity brought an equal share of risks. Crowley had been working on the assumption that Asmodeus was going to be unable to log-out to escape him. But it obviously was going to take considerably more finesse to beat an opponent who had the ability to port away to safety.

Still, finesse was his middle name.

Well, his middle name was actually Roderick, but that was beside the point. The _point_ was that this wasn’t the first time Crowley would need a particularly delicate touch to relieve a Mark of his wealth.

Another player might have reasoned out all the above and assumed it was too late to even try. If Asmodeus already had ports, the likelihood of him still being in Stangru was too low to bother with.

But Crowley had been around the block a few times. He knew the _best value_ game packs were available on Sundays, when the initial enthusiasm of the regular Saturday players had waned somewhat and the Devs wanted to squeeze a few more dollars out of them before they returned to work on Monday. So he reasoned that Asmodeus was probably going to be hanging around at least for one more day so that his game contact could hand over some more moola.

Which was why Crowley committed to his plan even before he left Melville by visiting a Mage and dropping half his Gold and then calling on a certain dark haired, doe-eyed NPC he’d had the considerable pleasure to meet a couple of days earlier. It cost a little more to buy her co-operation for a full day trip to Stangru than it had done to purchase a couple of hours of her time previously, but Crowley was confident enough of the little vixen’s charms and acting ability to know she was well-worth gambling the rest of his Gold on.

He sent her ahead of himself, deciding it would be far less suspicious if there were several hours between two different strangers arriving in Stangru’s main drinking and boarding house, a peculiarly English appearing pub called the ‘Slaughtered Lamb’. Crowley liked the name and the décor, even though it was disappointing it was only a fake-English pub since they primarily stocked Bourbon rather than Scotch.

Crowley definitely appreciated the dimly lit, wood-paneled interior when he arrived mid-afternoon and still found it easy to slink into a dark corner of the pub where, despite his own clear view of the bar area, he could lurk unobtrusively.

At the bar, joking with a group of NPCs, Asmodeus, still wearing the ridiculous off-white suit, was sitting with Crowley’s girl on his lap, his head thrown back with laughter as she flirted with him coyly. His profile read level 60, which was obviously impressing the hell out of the cronies hanging around him at the bar, though it was a full 20 levels lower than Crowley’s own 80. In a straight out fight, Crowley was almost certain to win. But if Asmodeus had the ports Crowley suspected he owned, then approaching him directly was pointless anyway since the ponce would just flee like a rat the minute he sniffed danger.

So Crowley just sat there and bided his time as his girl wove her magic. He had learned a long time ago that fools rushed in but wise men waited. If you wanted a chicken in your hand, it was better to hatch an egg than break it.

By five pm, Asmodeus was clearly feeling no pain. As Crowley had instructed, the girl had encouraged the barman to keep refilling the Knight’s glass and he, distracted by her attentions, seemed totally unaware of just how much he had drunk. Not enough to be insensate, admittedly, but Crowley had never expected him to be _that_ stupid. Drunk enough to have lost the edge of his instincts though. Drunk enough that he barely flicked a disinterested glance in Crowley’s direction when he activated the first of the two spells he had purchased that morning and _blurred _his profile enough that it would read as level 8, rather than 80, to anyone so deep in their cups as Asmodeus was, and then approached the bar and ordered a flagon of ale.

It was this purchase, his own flagon, into which he dropped the second item he had purchased from the Mage. A tiny but heavy Hex-bag that dropped like a stone, well out of sight.

Then it was just a process of legerdemain, of _accidentally_ taking Asmodeus’s half-empty flagon back to his table and leaving his own full one behind in its place. Of his girl pouring Asmodeus a drink from _that_ flagon. And then waiting, again, for the Knight to gradually slump on his barstool until his eyes closed and he hit the floor, completely out cold.

Crowley’s whore made a big drama of checking the unconscious man’s body for money, before complaining about ‘drunken idiots who pass out before paying a girl’ before stomping around the gathered NPC’s, hands on her hips, demanding to know which of them was holding _her_ money and who was going to pay her for her time now the big oaf had collapsed? Like magic, all the NPC’s made hasty retreats, leaving no-one in the bar except the girl, the barkeep, the unconscious knight and Crowley.

Then the girl flounced out in an apparent hissy-fit, though she winked at Crowley as she left to return to Melville having earned every coin he’d paid her.

“Shit,” the barkeep said, as the door opened and a group of players entered and walked towards the bar only to halt uncertainly at the sight of the man on the floor. They looked like they were about to leave again, taking their gold with them. The barkeep looked at Crowley and shrugged helplessly. “Drunken sot’s a fuckin’ guest here. So I can’t just chuck him out the door. Can you keep your eye on my stock for a minute, Mister, while I throw him in his room? Can’t trust those fuckin immigrants not to just help themselves.”

“Give me his room number, and I’ll throw him in for you,” Crowley offered instead, with a bored shrug, though he couldn’t believe his luck that the players had entered at precisely the right moment. He’d expected to at least have to bribe the Barkeep a little.

Which was why by 6pm, when Asmodeus woke up from his magically-induced slumber, he found himself suspended by ropes, upside down, from the ceiling rafters of his own bedchamber, arms tied behind his back, naked as a jaybird, and with a terrible sharp pain in his groin.

He looked downwards (well, upwards under the circumstances), in disbelief, and saw a thin wire descending tautly from the rafters until it looped in a cruel vice around his flopping genitals

“Don’t move an inch,” Crowley warned him pleasantly. “In fact, I highly suggest you don’t move _at all._ That’s cheese wire. So much as shiver and it will probably just slice through your flesh like butter and you’ll be screaming in soprano for the few seconds it takes you to bleed out.”

“You insane fucker,” Asmodeus spat.

“You undoubtedly already know you can’t log out,” Crowley continued, with a self-satisfied smirk, “but if you’re thinking of porting… well, remember that moment just before you blink out of one place to another? That little fraction of time when your whole body, well, _shivers_ ready for you to move? Not a good idea. Well, not unless you want to arrive somewhere else totally junkless for those few seconds you’re bleeding to death.”

There was a moment Crowley wondered whether Asmodeus would call his bluff. Which wasn’t even a bluff really, since activating a port _would_ cause the Knight’s body to jerk enough for the cheese-wire trap to activate. But, as a man himself, he was reasonably certain the threat of immediate total castration would be enough to make _anyone_ unlikely to make a rash decision.

“What the fuck do you want?” Asmodeus demanded.

“Well, if this was a beauty pageant, I’d undoubtedly say ‘world peace’ and a pony,” Crowley snickered. “But since it isn’t, I’ll settle for the contents of your inventory. I even created a Guild just for the occasion. It’s called ‘Crowley’s Fun Fund’. All generous donations gratefully accepted. I sent you an invite. I suggest you hurry up and get it done though. The problem with a hair-trigger trap like that one is all it would take is the occupants of the room upstairs to bounce a little too hard on their bed and, well, you’ll need to shave the beard and rename yourself Sue-Ellen.”

“I’ll fucking kill you, you noob. You have no idea who you’re messing with,” Asmodeus spat.

“Noob?” Crowley asked, frowning. He would have expected the blurring spell to have worn off by now. Nothing like the threat of getting your cock and balls sliced off to sober someone up. Still, it suited him well-enough that the glamor was still working. If Asmodeus realized he was a Knight, he’d be far more certain Crowley was intending to kill him and, consequently, far less likely to give in to the blackmail. “Sure,” he said smoothly. “I know you’ll be chasing after me the minute you get loose, but Moondoor’s a big place and I’ll have ports. I’ll take my chances,” he said.

“You’re planning to let me go?” Asmodeus demanded suspiciously.

“Course I am. Kill you and you’ll just jump back in game immediately and cut my head off, or probably worse, under the circumstances, won’t you?” Crowley said, with feigned innocence. “So the minute I get my stuff, I’ll cut through the wire, to prevent any nasty… um… accidents, then put the knife in your hands. By the time you manage to saw through the ropes and free yourself I’ll be long gone.”

Of course they both knew Asmodeus couldn’t die and come directly back into the game, since he only had one life remaining as a Knight of Hell; but since Asmodeus didn’t _know_ that Crowley knew that salient fact, the argument had legs.

And, possibly because he had no viable alternative except to trust Crowley was telling the truth, Asmodeus gave in and accepted the invitation to join his Guild.

Crowley’s inventory dinged cheerfully as 6 realm ports and a huge pile of Gold arrived. He resisted the urge to do a happy dance and instead drawled, “All your ports, fucktard.”

Asmodeus snarled but sent four more ports over.

Crowley was reasonably certain Asmodeus was still holding back, but ten ports wasn’t too shoddy a result and he didn’t want to push the other knight too far. After all, he wasn’t absolutely certain whether he could only rank up if he killed a knight with his actual bone dagger. He didn’t want to take the chance of Asmodeus accidentally killing _himself._

“Nice doing business with you,” he said, sauntering towards the door as though he was about to leave.

“You said you’d cut the wire,” Asmodeus snarled.

“Oh… of course. Silly me,” Crowley said, stepping back until he was a few inches from the dangling man. Which, unfortunately put him at eye-level with the other man’s groin. “Oops, bit tight huh? Looking a bit red and swollen there,” he said, with faux sympathy. “Now, um, where did I put my knife?” He patted his pockets absently.

“GET ME THE FUCK DOWN NOW,” Asmodeus yelled.

“Hold your horses,” Crowley said. “I know I put it _somewhere._ Let’s see… um… oh… there it is,” he said, reaching inside his jacket and withdrawing his crude bone dagger and deliberately waving it in Asmodeus’ face.

He relished the instant the other man’s widened with dawning terror, the look of sick realization spreading over the other man’s face, and sensed, rather than saw, the minute Asmodeus decided he’d rather take the chance of porting than be eviscerated as he dangled.

But it was too late.

Opening his inventory and scrambling to activate a port took at least two seconds longer than it took Crowley to plunge the business end of the dagger into Asmodeus’ heart.

And almost instantaneously power flooded into him. Not only the hundred levels he gained from killing the other Knight but his own base level leapt from 80 to 100 too. Before Asmodeus’ heart had even stopped beating, Crowley found himself inundated by message after message from his S.I.

It was so immensely satisfying that he didn’t even care, well not much, that the motion of stabbing the other knight had tripped the wire so he was standing there, covered in blood, staring at a huge gaping red wound where Asmodeus’s genitals had been.

“Oops,” he said, reaching for the handkerchief in his lapel pocket and using it to wipe the gore off his face.

So, irritatingly, he had to waste time taking a bath and summoning a new outfit before he could saunter back down to the bar and have a well-earned drink.

But since he now had more than enough gold to purchase himself a bespoke _designer_ black suit as the replacement for the ruined one, even _that_ wasn’t enough inconvenience to ruin Crowley’s perfectly wonderful Sunday.

“Cheers,” he said to the barman, as he raised a glass filled with perfect amber liquid to his lips and savored it as he considered his next course of action. 

The barman blinked at him uncertainly.

“Rank 2 Demonic Boss?” he asked cautiously. “Um what exactly is that? What, um, can you do?”

Crowley smirked. “I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell going to have fun finding out.


	74. Spilt Milk

Dean was morose and uncommunicative in the bar, more interested in drowning his sorrows than talking to his companions.

Ash and Sam, who both knew him well, simply steered the conversation around him without comment. Both knew that for all Dean looked furious and ready to attack anyone who so much as gave him a side-eye, the only person Dean was blaming for that day’s disaster was himself. They also knew that trying to reassure him otherwise would be about as useful as poking a bear with a sharp stick.

“Our biggest problem,” Charlie told them all, “is that we don’t have a clue where the other Knights are at the moment. On the plus side, that battle with the demons made us all level up some more. So we’re stronger now than we were this morning.”

“So is Cain,” Castiel replied shortly, looking even more furious than Dean.

“Spilt milk,” Sam said, with a shrug. “Realistically, it’s not an unsurmountable set-back. Cain already had a 190-point advantage. That’s why he seems so damned huge _now._ But truthfully, he’s only one rank higher than Dean at the moment. We can still pull this one back.”

“So why is Cain sitting inside _you_?” Meg asked Sam. Dean had, despite his air of total disinterest in the proceedings, at least remembered to pull her back out of his inventory before checking-out into his beer. In storage she wasn’t burning SP and Dean had earned even more of that during the fight with the demons so he needed Meg to be active as much as possible.

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, his tail thumping with alarmed agitation.

“That huge sexy hunk of an avatar is _you_, isn’t it?” she smirked. “And Cain is waiting for you to arrive at the steering wheel but it’s not going to happen, is it? Because you’re hiding in plain sight inside the cat.”

Everyone except Dean looked alarmed.

Dean’s expression didn’t flicker. He just drew his blade pointedly and began tapping the table with it as he continued drinking.

Meg just rolled her eyes. “I figured that out _before_ I saved your ass from that bitch Abaddon,” she told Sam pointedly.

“Do you, um, understand that we’re not actually ‘immigrants’?” he asked her. “Because the answer to your question could be hard to explain.”

“Kinda,” she said. “But I’m a bit woolly on the specific details.”

Dean raised his head and stared darkly at Sam as he began to clue Meg in, but he didn’t try to stop Sam from telling Meg the whole truth of the situation and, although he didn’t put his dagger away entirely, he stopped playing with the blade. Her reminder of having ‘saved’ Sam in the fight had, apparently, earned her some degree of cautious trust.

“I have an idea about the other knights,” Ash said. “When I log out, I’ll call Penelope and also get Bobby to contact Victor. Cain is in Nick’s avatar, which means Richard Roman is already dead. Well _more _dead. Since the alarms aren’t working in the immersion tanks, I doubt anyone has noticed he’s officially bought the farm yet but if we can convince the Feds to get a search warrant and break in to his apartment to find him, then Penelope could use _his _pc console to access the system even before the paperwork is filed for Campbell Holding’s claim of ownership.”

“Of course,” Charlie agreed. “Because even if it’s going to take days for her to get access to the actual mainframe to upload the program I wrote, even the most basic manager-level access would give her the ability to do a low-level hack and discover the current locations of the Knights.”

“I’ll go now,” Ash said. “It’s almost 10pm. If I wait any longer it will be too late to make the calls.”

“I think we should _all_ call it a night,” Charlie said. “I don’t think Ellen can afford Dean to drink any more. Looks like being a Rank 2 Boss is pretty much negating the effects of the beer anyway.”

“I too have found inebriation impossible to achieve,” Castiel agreed morosely, staring glumly at his own glass.

“FUCKIT,” Dean said, lurching to his feet. “I give up. You coming, Sam, or you wanna stay here and flirt with your new girlfriend instead?”

Sam hissed at him and curled his tail around his body. “Think I’ll leave you to it tonight. That beer might not have gotten you drunk but you’ll still be up and down all night, pissing like a racehorse.”

“Fine,” Dean snapped. “Didn’t want your furry ass in my bed anyway, cos if I get up in the middle of the night even one more time and stand on a fucking wet furball, I swear I will shave you bald.” Then he stomped off towards the staircase without a backward glance. Castiel silently rose and padded after him like a faithful dog.

“Dammit,” Ash said as they moved out of sight. “I think they’re both really hurting. Let’s hope I can come back with some good news tomorrow because today’s really done a number on their confidence. I can’t even begin to wonder how heavy this burden already felt for Dean, but I think it just got one hell of a lot heavier.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Charlie said, “but do you think Chuck fucked up? I mean it’s pretty impossible isn’t it? How the hell is a guy like Dean supposed to win against a monster like Cain anyway? Good guys don’t finish first.”

“Nasty things morals. Always rise up and choke you,” Meg agreed.

“I assume you’re speaking allegorically,” Gabriel sneered. “Since I doubt you’ve experienced the problem personally.”

“See, when you use big words like that it’s hard to know whether it’s Sam speaking or not,” Meg smirked. “But then I say to myself, which one’s the bigger dick? And it becomes clear who I’m talking to.”

###

Dean opened the door to his room and stomped through it, grabbing the door to slam it back in its frame hard enough to ensure Sam couldn’t change his mind and sneak in. For all his brother had thankfully left him in peace whilst the others were present, Dean was pretty sure Sam had stored up a whole plethora of uplifting comments to assail him with in private.

And fuck THAT shit.

He could have won. He _should_ have won. 

He knew _exactly_ the moment he had lost the fight. When Cain had said ‘I picked the wrong brother’ and, instead of just pushing through and ending the fight, Dean had allowed himself to become distracted by asking _why? _Okay, sure, there _was_ the remote possibility it wouldn’t have been that cut and dried. It wasn’t _guaranteed_ he could have ganked the bastard before he did that mind-whammy thing of trying to take him over. But, let’s face it, it had been his best (and possibly only) opportunity of doing so. Now, with Cain at 490, it was virtually guaranteed he would effortlessly slaughter every other Knight he came across and then win the ‘game’.

“I apologize,” he heard, just as he slammed the door.

The words, so incongruous considering his own mental self-flagellation were enough for him to turn back and open the door again, just in time to see Castiel, head lowered miserably, making a retreat to his own room. His whole posture spoke of misery and defeat. And the sight sparked fresh anger in Dean. He _hated_ seeing the proud, magnificent Angel look so beaten. Hated knowing it was _his_ fault Castiel looked so crushed.

And guilt made his voice harsh as he barked, “What the fuck are YOU apologizing for?”

Castiel startled and swiveled around, his eyes wide with shock. He took a couple of steps back towards Dean then hesitated, looking awkward and uncertain in the face of Dean’s snarling fury.

He swallowed heavily, visibly, before raising his eyes to meet Dean’s and saying, “You have every right to be furious with me. I have no excuse. I caused you to lose your battle today. I have no right to ask for your forgiveness. I do however, wish to sincerely apologize that my actions cost you victory.”

“What? Huh?” Dean demanded, blinking in confusion. “How the fuck did _you_ cost me victory? It was on me, Cas. All of it.”

“We agreed I would ‘take care’ of Abaddon. It was my failure to do so that allowed Cain to kill her himself and thus gain 2 more ranks of power.”

“Um, dunno if you noticed what actually went down, bud, but he already had me on the ropes at that point. If Abaddon hadn’t fallen on top of him and knocked him on his ass, Cain would be inside _me_ right now and this conversation wouldn’t even be happening.”

“Perhaps so,” Castiel allowed. “But had I killed Abaddon as you requested, I would have been free to assist you and I would have been perfectly capable of knocking Cain off his feet by myself.”

Dean considered that alternative scenario and nodded. It was plausible. Maybe. “So why didn’t you?” he demanded.

“I allowed myself to become distracted by my sister, Hester. Although she was merely acting as Abaddon’s system interface and was not embedded so had no more ability to affect her actions than Loki can affect yours; when Abaddon was near death, Hester was able to speak to me. She begged for her life. I found myself disarmed by her plea. It caused me to fail you. I apologize.”

“You’re apologizing for not wanting to murder your own _sister_?” Dean laughed bitterly. “I think I’d find it a lot harder to swallow if you told me that you’d actually done it. Fuck, Cas, I get you wanting to save your damned sister.”

“But her life was forfeit anyway,” Castiel pointed out with immeasurable sadness. “I did not save her. She died at Cain’s hands with Abaddon.”

“Then I’m sorry, Cas. Sorry she died. And that’s why I should be apologizing to _you. _If I’d done the job properly, if I’d killed Cain, then she wouldn’t have died. So it’s on me, not you.”

“I believe we are at an impasse,” Castiel said. “We both believe ourselves at fault.”

“Yeah,” Dean admitted heavily.

“So, perhaps, it benefits neither of us to continue with our arguments. Perhaps, as Sam said, this is all merely ‘spilt milk’ and it would best behoove us to learn from the experience and move forwards to ensure Cain is stopped.”

“Behoove,” Dean said. “Did Jimmy teach you that word?”

“I did not require him to teach me words. I was programmed with a comprehensive knowledge of several human languages. I believe what I required him to teach me was how humans _thought._ Sadly, we were separated before my understanding was complete.”

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “You seem to be doing fine to me.”

“I am?”

“Must be, because five minutes ago I was ready to punch a wall and give up. Now, well I just have an overwhelming urge to track down and punch _Cain_ for putting that look on your face.”

Castiel frowned. “What look?”

Dean chewed his lower lip. “I don’t like it when you look broken, Cas. Sad, defeated, all that shit. It doesn’t suit you and I don’t like it.”

“May I remind you I am a V.I., Dean? Whatever you believe you are seeing in the face of this avatar, it is not real. I am not real. Not as _humans_ understand reality.”

“Fuck that shit,” Dean snarled. “You’re fucking _real, _Cas. You must be because if you weren’t, I sure as shit wouldn’t want to do _this.”_

Before he could second guess himself, before Castiel could react, Dean surged forward to meet him, throwing his arms around Castiel’s body in a firm hug. A hug that _might_ have remained brotherly except that after finding himself directly face to face with the Angel, with their lips less than an inch apart, it was instinct, rather than conscious decision, that caused Dean to dramatically increase the stakes by pressing a firm, closed-mouth but forceful kiss against Cas’s lips.

Castiel was stunned into inaction. He just stood there, arms dangling, mouth not responding, as he struggled to compute what was happening. It took him a few seconds to code a response, to shuffle through Jimmy’s old memories to understand he was supposed to raise his own arms and hug back, was supposed to press his lips forwards in welcome rather than simply freeze like a manikin.

So, even as he willed his hands to move, to reciprocate, it was too late.

Dean broke away, stepping back, flushing hotly, looking vaguely horrified at his own actions. “Sorry, um, sorry. Tension thing. Got a bit carried away,” he mumbled, reaching over to straighten Castiel’s jerkin and then patting his shoulders awkwardly. “Um, let’s…let’s um… pretend that didn’t happen,” he said. “Yup. Didn’t happen,” he repeated, back-pedaling away. “Um…. See ya tomorrow, Cas. Buddy. Yeah. Buddy.”

And with a slam of his bedroom door, he was gone and Castiel was left standing alone in the hallway.

Only, it turned out he wasn’t alone.

Behind him, staring with huge golden eyes, was a small ginger cat.

Sam was too busy gaping with shock to say anything coherent, so Gabriel dove in and took over. “So, um, what was that?” he asked Castiel.

Castiel just blinked at him uncomprehendingly, raising one hand to touch his mouth with a puzzled frown.

“You and Dean,” Gabriel clarified. “What was that all about?”

“Dean. Uh. Dean hugged me,” Castiel said, his expression cool but his eyes shifting awkwardly away from the cat’s penetrating glare.

“With his mouth,” Gabriel drawled.

Castiel patted his lips again, guiltily, but then looked defiant as he stated firmly, “Yes. He hugged me with his mouth.”

Sam snorted wetly, then sneezed.

“A hug?” Gabriel mocked.

“A hug is to press someone tightly in one's arms especially as a sign of affection,” Castiel insisted.

“Thank you Mr. Merriam-Webster,” Gabriel replied drolly. “So define ‘kiss’ for me too now, would you?”

Castiel smirked triumphantly as he quoted, “to touch with the lips especially as a mark of affection or greeting. Therefore also a legitimate form of _hug._”

Gabriel sneered. “Very clever. I admit as a transitive verb it could loosely be defined as a ‘hug’. Try it again as a noun.”

Castiel frowned then flinched slightly. “I do not believe so,” he retorted, looking more saddened than embarrassed. “Dean most certainly did not ‘caress’ me with his lips. The action was most decidedly more energetic than a ‘caress’.”

“Mmmm,” Gabriel crooned. “So it was ‘energetic’. Energetic. Dynamic. Lusty. Vigorous. Red-blooded…. _Passionate, _perhaps?”

“Whilst Dean is easily aroused to anger, I do not believe his actions stemmed from rage,” Castiel replied coolly.

“Ooooh, very clever,” Gabriel snorted. “Though you know damned well that wasn’t the definition I was going for. But no matter, your sophistry is sufficient proof you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“_Did you two guys both swallow a dictionary for breakfast?” _Sam demanded silently.

“_Hello, computer programs_,” Gabriel replied. “_How the fuck do you _think_ we manage to find context for all the shit we experience when dealing with you monkeys_?”

“_Point_,” Sam admitted thoughtfully.

“The events of today were trying and traumatic for both of us,” Castiel stated with dignity. “We both apologized to each other for our perceived failures and then Dean expressed his forgiveness and _affection_ by offering me a _hug. _It was unexpected. But… nice.”

“Nice,” Gabriel repeated mockingly. “It was _nice_?”

“Pleasing and agreeable,” Castiel offered helpfully.

“I know what ‘Nice’ means,” Gabriel snorted. “But how did it make you feel? Huh? That’s what I want to know.”

“Feel?” Castiel asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Yeah, Cassie. How did it make you _feel?”_

Castiel frowned for several seconds as he searched for an answer before shrugging helplessly. “I cannot find any definition that would make your question meaningful in this context. Are you certain you are using the correct word?”

“Hmmm,” Gabriel said, twitching Sam’s whiskers. “I was worried about that.”

“About what?” Castiel asked, looking mildly alarmed. “Is it wrong for me to have found Dean’s hug ‘nice’?”

“Oh no, not at all. Enjoy it. Fill your boots. You obviously have a strong attachment towards each other. That’s definitely ‘nice’. Can I suggest, possibly, you might even _cherish_ each other?”

Castiel considered that thoughtfully, then his eyes brightened and he nodded with enthusiasm. “I believe that is a perfect word. Dean and I, despite our occasional misunderstandings, appear both determined to cultivate our relationship with both care and affection.”

“That’s fine then,” Gabriel said brightly. “Get some sleep, little bro. Let’s hope tomorrow is a better day for all of us.”

Sam waited for Castiel to slip into his room and close the door behind him before demanding: “What was _that _all about?”

“Bit of trouble in paradise,” Gabriel sighed. “It’s like the whole fucking world is just stacking shit up to throw at your poor sap of a brother.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam said.

“I know. But the _real_ problem is that _Cassie_ doesn’t understand, and I honestly don’t see how he ever will under the circumstances.”

“Understand _what? _And _what_ circumstances?” Sam demanded impatiently.

“Sex,” Gabriel replied bluntly.

“Uggg. Dunno if I want to know,” Sam cringed.

“Don’t be a wuss. You’ve figured out Dean has a boner for Cassie, obviously. I don’t know him well enough to say whether that translates to the ‘L’ word but Cas… well, I honestly think he’s more than a little in love with Dean. The fact he keeps jumping between Dean and certain death with a whole ‘you wanna kill him, you kill me first’ vibe is a honking great clue. ‘No greater love’ and all that shit.”

“Okaaay,” Sam said slowly. “So what’s the problem? Dean likes Cas. Cas likes Dean. Sounds kinda poetic to me.”

“Sex,” Gabriel repeated. “That’s the problem. Castiel has no sexual instincts whatsoever.”

“Because he’s a V.I.? Huh. Makes sense, I guess. I know a lot of NPC characters are programmed to behave in sexual ways but I don’t suppose you guys are _really _into that kind of thing.”

“Don’t be so damned racist. Do you honestly imagine that I never enjoy getting down and dirty? Hell, the worst part about being in this avatar is the highly frustrating fact I’m flexible enough now to actually blow myself but the idea of getting my tongue caught on those barbs again don’t make it worth the effort.”

“What do you mean _again?”_ Sam demanded.

“So, okay, I tried it the other night when you were asleep but, trust me, won’t be doing _that_ a second time.”

“That’s why my tongue stings when I eat? You got it ripped up by… ugggg. You unforgivable bastard.”

“Heh,” Gabriel chuckled unrepentantly.

“But back to the point. Why then are _you_ sexually interested and Castiel isn’t?” Sam challenged.

“I never said he wasn’t _interested._ I’m not even saying he’s not capable. I said he has no sexual _instincts. _That’s why he struggled when I asked him how he _feels. _Humans use the word to describe emotions because having ‘feelings’ is a _physical _sensation and human bodies respond physically to emotional stimulus. The only physical sensations Castiel has experienced are ones related to _pain._ In the sadly short time he shared a body with James Novak, he was only exposed to a body suffering intense medical pain. Oh, and probably hunger, thirst, that kind of thing. So he understands the _concept_ of feelings. But he most definitely never would have been exposed to attraction or sexual desire. Stick him back in Jimmy’s _healthy _body, lock him in a room with Dean in _your_ world, and I bet my bottom dollar he’d clue in pretty damned quickly because sex is, well, cool. But, under the circumstances, I don’t see how he will _ever_ be able to translate his ‘love’ for Dean into any form of sexual desire. It’s like he’s completely missing the decryption code to translate emotion into that form of action. Bluntly, it doesn’t matter how much he grows to _love _anyone, or even how aesthetically pleasing he might find them; he’s _never_ going to get a hard-on over them.”

“You’re saying he’s capable of Agape or Philia, but not Eros?”

“Well I wouldn’t put it that way, ‘cos I’m not a pretentious dick, but, yeah, basically.”

Sam ignored the jibe. “Jesus. Dean really _can’t _catch a break, can he? In _our _world he isn’t physically capable of sexual activity. His paralysis is total beneath the waist. So even if, by some miracle, Jimmy survives and Dean gets back home, Dean can’t ever transform _that_ relationship into a sexual one. In Moondoor he’s…um.. fully capable but you’re telling me Cas is, well, Asexual I guess, so that kind of relationship is off the table here too.”

“Yup,” Gabriel agreed.

“Shit, that sucks,” Sam groaned.

“Or not,” Gabriel snickered. “Sorry. Couldn’t help it. Seriously it _does _suck. For both of them. I was kind of cheering this on from the sidelines but I fucked up. I forgot how ill Jimmy was. I doubt he even had morning wood given how physically debilitated his body was. So now I’m worried about Cassie. I don’t want him getting confused or hurt over this. He might be a badass V.I. but he’s a just a kid, really. He’s only experienced being in a physical form for a couple of weeks, so in this situation he’s like a teenager falling for his first crush without any idea whatsoever of what he’s doing. So I’m worried about him. And Dean. I’m concerned this growing attachment between them is going to hurt them _both_ in the end.”

“It won’t change how Dean feels about Cas,” Sam pointed out. “I mean, if he does _really_ like him, it won’t be a deal breaker. Dean’s all about the feels. I’m sure he’s _hoping_ for more. Hell, after ten years of enforced celibacy he’s probably gagging for _more._ But, trust me, Gabriel. You don’t need to worry about Castiel. Dean wouldn’t _ever_ put his own desires over someone else’s. And I don’t think Cas is as fragile as you imagine either. That’s just you being an over-protective big brother and, trust me, I know how much you guys get all over-zealous about that shit. Truth is, Cas has years of experience of being alive, albeit in a different form. He’s a grown man, program, whatever, and can look after his own heart. But, trust me, even if he can’t, if there is anyone in this world, or any other, who will treat that heart like it’s made of spun-glass, it’s Dean.”

“Hope so,” Gabriel said. “Because otherwise I’ll make you sit on his face and smother him in his sleep.”


	75. Lemonade sucks

_“Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” Dan Salomon._

Dean was a great proponent of the adage ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ So he descended the stairs into the bar area with a totally calm expression on his face and a deliberate nonchalance to his walk. Even though the idea of seeing Castiel again, after the previous night’s faux pas, was actually making his stomach turn somersaults.

He had decided to be totally cool with the Angel, all hail fellow well met, all ‘hey, buddy’, and pray, desperately, that Castiel would go along with him and let the _specific _embarrassing details of the previous evening’s encounter go unmentioned in front of the others. Or, preferably, unmentioned at all.

If not, he figured he could blame the copious amounts of alcohol for his behavior. It wasn’t like anyone could actually _prove_ he’d been sober.

Fortunately, though, he was immediately distracted by two important facts. Firstly, Ash wasn’t sitting at the table with the others despite his habit of usually arriving in plenty of time to eat breakfast with them all. Secondly, and even more alarmingly, Sam was sitting on Meg’s lap, his backside on her crotch, his belly sprawled down her thighs, doing the whole ‘biscuit’ thing with his front paws with a look of smug bliss on his furry face while her hands were constantly stroking over his head and back with a far too intimate amount of touch.

Which was disturbing on several levels.

“So, um, Sam,” he said, awkwardly. “You sure that’s appropriate?”

Anyone who claimed cats were inscrutable had never truly met a cat. Sam’s only reply was a look, but that furry expression very loudly said multitudes. The majority of which condensed to “Fuck you”.

Deciding discretion was the best part of valor, Dean segued easily into his other question, “So, where’s Ash?”

“Been and gone already,” Charlie said. “Basically just popped in-game long enough to tell us he wouldn’t be joining us today. Victor Hendrickson has strong-armed him into agreeing to visit Quantico to back him up with his bosses. Apparently Victor is still struggling to get anyone to take him seriously. Since Ash is the only person who knows exactly what’s going on _and_ is able to log in and out still, Victor thinks his testimony will sway people into believing what he’s been trying to tell them.”

“Ash agreed to visit the FBI Headquarters?” Dean asked incredulously. “_Our_ Ash?”

“Not happily,” Charlie admitted. “But we’re kind of out of other options at the moment. Without some external help, I can’t even begin to imagine what direction we should head in next. So we’re stuck here.”

“Hmmm,” Dean agreed, feeling a fresh wave of guilt over his failure to resolve the situation the day before.

Pausing her highly disturbing petting of his brother, Meg announced, “No, you’re not.”

“What do you mean?” Charlie demanded.

“You’re idiots,” Meg said, rudely, and rolled her eyes. “Particularly you, Dean. Pretty but moronic. You’re a demonic_ boss_, but the advantages are clearly wasted on you entirely.”

“Hey, that’s not nice,” Charlie pointed out, with a repressive frown.

“I’m a demon. Being ‘nice’ isn’t one of my aspirations,” Meg replied. “Particularly in the company of morons.”

“She is not incorrect,” Castiel said, thoughtfully.

Dean flinched and gave him a betrayed, wounded look.

Castiel shook his head. “You misunderstand,” he told Dean. “She is correct that we have all been overlooking something that should have been obvious. As a demonic boss, you have the ability to summon demonic assistance. You also still have a considerable surplus of soul points to use as currency. You could summon a number of lower demons and task _them_ with searching for the locations of the other knights. Sending a team of demons out on a wide search pattern throughout Moondoor would be far more effective than attempting to physically locate the knights ourselves.”

“See,” Meg crowed. “It’s perfectly possible to be pretty _and_ smart,” she told Dean. “You should try it sometime.”

“Meg could lead them on the search,” Charlie suggested, a little nastily. “Since she’s so gung ho for the idea.”

“Nope,” Meg replied. “I’m on vacation, remember? Think I’ll just hang around here and pet Sammy today.”

Dean looked like he’d swallowed something nasty.

Sam responded by rolling over onto his back and offering the demon his belly to scritch.

###

Crowley didn’t have a Meg to point out the particular benefits of being a demonic boss.

What he did have, however, was years of experience of being the boss of ‘Hell’.

The fact his previous in-house ‘employees’ had been low-level NPC’s programmed to just _act_ like hellish demons, particularly those of the Succubae persuasion, within his online brothel was just ‘detail’. The bottom line was he was well-experienced in having NPC minions to do his dirty work. So the very first thing he did, when he realized that killing Asmodeus had gifted him ‘demonic boss’ status, was experiment to find out what benefits that status offered him.

Okay. Not the first thing because, admittedly, the first benefit he discovered (and decided to indulge in) was more in line with his urge to thoroughly celebrate his victory. Although he had enjoyed the taste of the whiskey he imbibed in The Slaughtered Lamb, it had soon become evident that his character level was too high now to allow actual inebriation. He hadn’t intended to become _drunk_, obviously, but he had hoped at least for a mild buzz. Disappointingly, as a Rank 2 boss, his avatar seemed to shrug off any effects of the alcohol even faster than he could consume it.

He was sure sex, though, would still be perfectly enjoyable.

Which was why he’d ‘wasted’ one of his realm ports and had transported himself _home._

Returning to Hades City wasn’t something he considered a ‘waste’ though. The truth was he’d only ever needed to win _one_ realm port off Asmodeus to be back in the game entirely. The Guildhouse in Hades was stuffed full of all the RSS, weapons and gear he could ever possibly desire. And though he suspected he would be unable to _formally_ retake the reins of his Guild, since his current player character was effectively monster-class rather than player-class so he was unlikely to be allowed by the game engine to take over as R10 of a _player_ guild, there wasn’t a member of _his_ guild who would dare to refuse him any assets (or ports) he demanded. He was, after all, their employer in real life too.

Which was why Crowley spent a comfortable, relaxing and highly enjoyable Sunday night in one of the premier suites of Hades City’s ‘Hell’ brothel with a couple of charming and extremely gymnastic companions.

And also why he woke up on Monday morning with the idea that he should exercise his new demonic abilities a little and see if he could encourage _real _demons to be equally accommodating. Not in a sexual way, though he wasn’t completely averse to the idea, but in a more _useful_ way. 

Such as sending them out to locate the other knights.

Meg, had she been there, would have undoubtedly approved of his natural initiative.

###

“So, what now?” Charlie asked.

Meg shrugged. “We wait. Until either your friend Ash or the demons return with some news. No point running around aimlessly chasing our tails.”

“Waiting sucks,” Dean said, kicking his legs against the base of his chair like a petulant five-year-old.

“It’s like a form of ADHD,” Sam told the room, with a fangy grin. “Short attention span. Dean doesn’t do well with boredom.”

“Good,” Ellen announced, as she picked up their breakfast dishes. “Because I have a stack of washing up with his name on. Fed up of freeloaders around here anyway.”

Dean frowned at her. “I happen to know Ash insisted on giving you a stack of gold to cover our board and lodging before he left yesterday,” he pointed out.

“He paid for you, Charlie and Castiel,” she agreed pleasantly. “But not for the cat.”

“You got far more than enough to cover _all _of us.”

“Deals a deal. He paid for you three specifically. Never mentioned the cat,” she said smugly.

Dean rolled his eyes. “He’s a damned cat. He doesn’t even have his own room.”

“He eats,” she said. “So you, kitchen, _now_.” She glared at him with her hands on her hips until he wilted under her gaze and gave in.

Dean stomped off towards the back of the bar, muttering under his breath that he couldn’t see why Sam’s new ‘girlfriend’ couldn’t wash the damned dishes, but his stride was easy and his shoulders, which had been tight with tension, appeared to have relaxed considerably with the prospect of something to do, however menial.

“He’s not a bad short-order cook too,” Ellen added. “I can keep him busy for a few hours. Try to get some good news for him soon, though. I can’t distract him _all _damned day.”

###

Although the outcome had been, ultimately, extremely fortuitous, Cain’s confidence had been considerably rocked by his confrontation with Dean Winchester.

It hadn’t only been Dean’s ability as a fighter. That hadn’t been unexpected. He’d always known Dean was the brother who would have been his perfect host if not for the ‘accident’. What really disturbed Cain was the fact Chuck had not only somehow interfered with the Knights of Hell subroutine to bring Dean into the fight but had, also, managed to conceal his existence completely within the metadata of Moondoor.

Chuck had buried Dean’s existence from him completely; he had concealed the existence of a tenth knight from all of Cain’s reports from the mainframe. If he had done _that_, who knew what other nasty surprises Chuck had hidden inside of Moondoor?

Then, as though _that_ piece of hacking hadn’t been enough, somehow Chuck had removed the ports Cain had stashed inside Nick’s inventory. He hadn’t noticed when he first logged in because there had been _one_ port available for immediate use so he hadn’t bothered checking for the remainder. If he had, if he had realized right away, he would still have had time to go back and deal with the problem. But an hour or so later, trying to return and revitalize Nick’s dead body was impossible.

Which was why _one_ port had been left, he realized. To trick him into committing himself inside the game with no way to reverse his decision.

Chuck, or whoever was now working on his behalf, was playing dirty pool.

What Cain really didn’t understand was why Dean was working for Chuck at all. Didn’t the fool know it had been Chuck who put him in his wheelchair? Maybe not. Maybe that was a snippet of information he would be able to use to his advantage if they ended up in combat again. If. If one of the other Knights didn’t kill Dean first. Which was always a possibility. And that would make another Knight of level 3 at least. So Cain didn’t have time to waste, ports or no ports.

The closest knight to his current location was Belial. 

According to Cain’s intel, Belial was 85 miles to his East in a town named, appropriately enough, Salem. Which would take him the best part of a day to reach on foot. Which, clearly, was completely out of the question.

So before he left Ravensclaw on Sunday evening, Cain had procured himself a mount. Well, less _procured_ than stolen considering he’d left the previous owner of the huge silver-coated Wyvern lying face-down in a pool of blood. The beast wasn’t the fastest ride because its wings were purely for show and the miniature dragon walked on its two back legs like a Tyrannosaurus, but it still meant he was able to travel through the night, whilst getting a modicum of rest, and it still shaved several hours off the journey time. 

Which was why by lunchtime on Monday, Cain was already approaching the outskirts of Salem and preparing to become a Rank 4 Boss.

###

“What are you doing in here?” Dean demanded, his voice gruff.

“Watching you cook burgers,” Castiel said literally. “You appear very competent at the task.”

“I am,” Dean agreed. “So I don’t need help.”

“I did not offer to ‘help’,” Castiel pointed out. “I came in here primarily to talk.”

Dean shuddered visibly at the prospect. “I’m not much of a talker,” he grunted repressively.

“That is incorrect. You frequently talk at length,” Castiel said. “However, you rarely speak of yourself. Your primary topic of conversation is Sam. You often express anger or annoyance. You also speak with considerable passion over various items of food. You say very little of your personal feelings, however.”

“Feelings?” Dean asked warily.

“Last night, Gabriel asked me how I ‘felt’ about you hugging me,” Castiel replied. “It occurred to me that I had not previously considered ‘feelings’ in such a context. I initially believed my unfamiliarity with the concept was purely due to my lack of human-type experience. However, it has since occurred to me that you rarely mention ‘feelings’ either. It therefore occurred to me that our failure to find a common method of communication was probably the source of our occasional misunderstandings. Gabriel offered me the word ‘cherish’ to describe my interaction with you. The word resonated with me. I believe I do endeavor to show care and affection for you. I believed you attempted to demonstrate a reciprocal amount of care and affection by your action of hugging me, despite your failure to verbalize your ‘feelings’.”

“You talked to Gabriel?” Dean asked, blanching.

“He witnessed our hug of affection,” Castiel replied.

“And Sam saw us?” Dean bleated.

“Since Gabriel is inside Sam, I believe it is highly unlikely he did not,” Castiel replied, dryly. “Though, admittedly, I did not speak with Sam at _that _time.”

“What do you mean ‘at that time’?” Dean queried suspiciously.

“I have spoken to Sam this morning whilst you have been occupied,” Castiel admitted, with a shrug. “He has advised me that I have most likely misinterpreted our interactions. That it is unlikely you were endeavoring to demonstrate any _particular_ emotion with regard to our relationship and that you are simply a habitual ‘hugger’. “

“A _hugger?”_ Dean demanded incredulously.

_“_I was not formerly aware the word had a noun form. I realize now that I possibly misunderstood your action as being indicative of an emotion that is does not exist. Therefore, I decided for the avoidance of doubt, I should ask you directly whether you also _cherish_ our friendship.”

“Hang on, let me get this straight. You asked Sam whether I liked you? I mean, whether I _like, liked_ you. And he said ‘no’?” Dean demanded.

“I am unsure of the contextual significance of ‘like, liked you’. However, if you mean I was enquiring whether your affection towards me was of a specific and possibly unique nature, then you are correct,” Castiel said. “And it is probably inappropriate that I chose not to accept his expertise in the matter and decided, instead, to ask you directly for clarification. However, I believe important information should always be acquired from a direct source whenever possible. Don’t you agree?”

“Absofuckinglutely,” Dean responded, then muttered under his breath, “fucking little cock-blocking asshole. I’ll kick his furry butt.”

“So my question remains. Was the hug an indication of particular affection or are you, as Sam claims, merely a ‘hugger’?”

“Trust me when I say I am _not _in the habit of hugging people I am not feeling specific affection for,” Dean snorted. “I can also say without a shadow of a doubt that it will be a cold day in hell before Sam’s furry ass gets another fucking hug from me.”

“Oh,” Castiel said.

“Oh,” Dean agreed.

“I am gratified to know that our affection is mutual,” Castiel said, after a pause, when it became obvious Dean had nothing more to offer.

“So…um… the hug thing was okay?” Dean asked cautiously.

Castiel smiled. Not his normal lip twitching _hint_ of a smile but a genuine wide one, all teeth and gums. The expression transformed his face from his normal unapproachable perfection to a far more approachable form of beauty. One that made Dean’s heart stutter slightly as its rhythm skipped gears. “It was very nice,” Castiel said, and though the word was small, it was clear from his expression that those four letters were imbued with ‘feeling’. “I would not be averse to you communicating with me in that fashion again,” Castiel said. “I find your chosen method of expressing yourself to be as effective as verbalization now that I understand it in context.”

“Huh,” Dean said, incapable of any more intelligent response under the circumstances.

“I believe your burgers are burning, Dean.”

With a curse, Dean returned his attention to the meat patties and flipped them over just in time to prevent them from charring. When he turned back to continue the conversation, Castiel had quietly left the kitchen.

Still, it was just as well, he told himself, despite his disappointment that the Angel had retreated as soon as he’d acquired the information he’d been seeking. The behavior of the V.I. was as typical as it was frustrating. Besides, the truth was, as much as he was pleased and relieved that Castiel had responded positively to his highly inappropriate actions of the previous evening, he was still unsure what he was supposed to do next. Despite being brave enough to ‘confront’ him head-on about the ‘hug’, Castiel had not mentioned the actual ‘kiss’, had he? So Dean still wasn’t certain where he stood.

Also, before speaking any further with Castiel, Dean wanted a conversation with his brother.

What the fuck was Sam’s problem? That Cas wasn’t _real? _Unlikely considering the way he was rolling around lapping up Meg’s attention. So what possible reason had Sam had to try to convince Castiel that Dean wasn’t interested in him in _that_ way?

He didn’t know, but he was damned well going to find out.

###

The difference between a player level 490 and a player level 70 was dramatically immense.

So much so that Cain found the encounter with Belial almost boring.

Only _almost _boring though because, unexpectedly, Belial’s S.I. made an appearance and attempted to fight back.

It still didn’t make _that_ much difference. A level 260 character was still no match for Cain, so defeating Raphael was almost laughably easy but it still gave him some pause for thought after Belial’s avatar flickered out of existence forever.

He had expected the hosted V.I. to flee when faced by such overwhelming odds. Fifteen years previously he had become aware almost immediately that killing the Knights in game was causing their immersion tanks to erase their stored data, effectively permanently killing both vessels and hosts simultaneously. Fortunately, Richard Roman had been unaware of that fact and so had the other knights. In fact, it had only been Ramiel who had wised up in time to extract himself from his host.

This time though, all the V.I.s were fully aware of the stakes (even if the Knights themselves still appeared largely ignorant) so, under the circumstances, it would have made more sense for Raphael to flee than to take over his host and fight.

Cain didn’t _care_ that killing Belial had also caused the Angel’s death. The situation was, however, puzzling and Cain didn’t like mysteries because they had a nasty way of sneaking up and biting your ass later.

It couldn’t be a changed game engine parameter, because Cain had found no difficulty skipping hosts from Roman to Nick and, all things considered, he was no stronger, fundamentally, than any other Arch Angel. Sure, if Raphael had only been a seraph, like Hester, the option to simply leap out of the host wouldn’t have been available. But Raphael’s programming had been as sophisticated as his own. The only substantive difference between them had been the dramatically different player level of their host bodies.

Which suggested Raphael’s idiotic decision to fight rather than flee had stemmed not from his being a weaker entity but from some deliberately programmed difference of ‘character’. Had Chuck built subroutines into his own ‘children’ to prevent them from abandoning their hosts? Possibly. That would make sense in the current scenario. After the events of the past, Chuck would probably have been wary of the idea of another ‘Cain’ being created.

Unless…

And suddenly Cain thought of a much more compelling reason for Chuck to have trapped the V.I.’s inside their chosen hosts. What if Chuck had been trying to ensure that none of the V.I.’s decided to hop out of their hosts and into a far more appealing one? One far more likely to defeat Cain? One who didn’t even have a _real _Arch Angel to displace. One who was operating with only an _aspect_ of an Arch Angel?

Dean Winchester’s presence in the game suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.

He hadn’t been put there to cut Cain’s options in half after all.

He’d been put into the conflict so that _Chuck_ could ride him out of Moondoor and claim RRE.

Except that couldn’t be right because Chuck was _dead. _Wasn’t he? Sure, Cain knew that an _aspect_ of Chuck had survived, because that bastard ‘Charles Shurley’ was still sneaking around somewhere, but Chuck’s core had been destroyed. He’d seen the report and that huge amount of dramatic data destruction couldn’t have been faked.

But it had been what Chuck had originally _intended_. So the other Arch Angels in play had all had their wings deliberately clipped by Chuck and that meant not one of them was now in a position to actively stand in Cain’s way.

Cain laughed, the sound deep and resonant and gleeful. Of course, he realized. There _was_ no one left in Moondoor capable of stopping him now. Not one of Chuck’s ‘children’ were capable of breaking their own programming enough to stand against him, even to save their own lives.

But, no time to waste.

His next destination was Stangru where a Knight named Asmodeus had been hanging around for several days. With the wyvern, he could reach Stangru by mid-day Tuesday and then, with that one extra rank, he’d qualify for the First Blade and he’d be virtually unstoppable.

###

“You, outside now, or I’ll pick you up by the scruff of your neck and carry you myself,” Dean stated.

Sam, who had already been alarmed by the way Dean had stormed purposefully out of the kitchen in his direction, didn’t bother to argue. He had seen Castiel slip behind the bar and disappear briefly into the kitchen area so he had a damned good idea what this was about. Looking at his brother’s expression, this wasn’t going to be pretty so it was best not to have the argument in public. So he leaped off Meg’s lap and made for the front door without any protest.

“Okay, speak,” Dean said, when they were alone. He raised his hand, with his index finger less than an inch from his thumb and said, “And you’d better make it good because I am _this_ far away from just drop-kicking you so far you’ll still be crawling back tomorrow.”

Wide-eyed, Sam swallowed heavily. “Um… so about that,” he said, weakly.

“Look, Deano,” Gabriel interrupted. “It was meant kindly, okay? Done for your own good and all that.”

“Shut the fuck up, you parasite,” Dean snarled. “This is between me and Sam.”

“Nuh huh, this is about _my_ brother too, so you don’t get to tell me to stay out of it,” Gabriel argued.

“But I do,” a deep voice rumbled from behind them.

Dean and Sam both turned guiltily to face Castiel, who had followed them out of the door.

“Fuck,” Dean spat defensively. “Stop sneaking around like a creeper. Wear a damned bell or something.”

“I believe this conversation concerns me too,” Castiel replied calmly. “Therefore I should also be party to it.” He turned his attention towards Sam and glowered. “I believe you purposefully misled me as to Dean’s intentions. I, too, would like an explanation for your deceit.”

“Sam was….” Gabriel began.

“Fucking let me use my own mouth,” Sam interrupted with a snarl.

“But I…”

“Not now.”

“He’s my…”

“I don’t care.”

“Um, you do realize you look and sound totally insane, right?” Dean pointed out, with a smirk, though his eyes were still dark with anger. “Do they even make cat-sized straightjackets?”

“Okay, fine,” Sam spat. “I was trying to save _both_ of you some hurt, but it looks like that ship has sailed anyway so I might as well just rip off the bandaid.” He then proceeded to tell both Dean and Castiel a synopsis of the conversation he and Gabriel had the previous evening. “And I was going to stay out of it,” he added hurriedly, “but then Castiel spoke to me this morning and it seemed a good opportunity to head this thing off at the pass and stop _either _of you getting hurt. You’d both chalk it up to a simple misunderstanding and go back to the way you were before. No harm, no foul. It’s not like you’re not the master of repression anyway, Dean.”

“Well, thank you, Sigmund Sam,” Dean drawled. “What the fuck gives you the right to decide what is or isn’t important to me? So Cas is asexual maybe? Okay, probably. So what? Yeah, I admit I think that’s a bummer, but _you_ don’t get to decide whether or not that’s acceptable to me. The only people with dogs in this fight are Cas and me. And you know something? What really hurts is that _you_ seem to think it would be a deal-breaker for me. It’s like you don’t know me at all, Sam.”

Sam’s tail began a furious thudding against the ground. “You think I don’t know you?” he snarled. “It’s exactly _because_ I know you that I tried to interfere. I’m sick of it, Dean. Sick and fucking tired of you always being the goddamned martyr. Always putting other people’s needs in front of your own. Do I think you’d be okay with having a platonic relationship with Cas? Hell, yeah I do. But it’s not right. It’s not what you _really_ want. It’s just yet another situation you’d put up with and adjust to because _your_ needs don’t ever fucking matter, do they?

“But I’ve had it with that shit, Dean. Look where we are. What we’re doing. The odds are stacked against us. The chances of any of us getting out of this alive at all are minimal at best. It’s like we’re at the end of the fucking world, in Apocalypse city, and even _now_, even with the weight of everyone’s lives crushing you down, with some asshole deciding it’s you, Dean Winchester, who has to somehow save us all, you _still_ don’t believe your own needs or wants _really _matter. And that’s bullshit.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Dean snapped.

“I don’t?” Sam challenged. “Tell me, Dean. When has anything _ever _been about you? When you saved me from the fire? When you voluntarily cleared off with our drunken, abusive, asshole of a father, just to make sure he’d leave _me_ safe and happy with mom? Did you do _that_ for yourself? Or after mom died, when you spent the rest of your childhood running one scam after another to keep me fed? When you skipped most of your own education to make sure I got mine? When you spent most of your compensation money from the accident to make sure I got to college, got to follow _my_ dream? It’s like from the moment I was born I stole every chance you had of _ever_ having a real-life of your own. If there’s any parasite here, it’s _me. _It’s like I’ve been accidentally sucking your life and soul out for my whole existence and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t be that guy. I can’t be the one who always lets _you_ pay the price for _my _happiness. And I sure as shit can’t just stand by and watch you compromise, yet again. I can’t let either Jimmy _or _Castiel become your _new_ Sam. You deserve better, Dean. You always have. You always will. You just need to… well, learn to believe it, I guess.”

“WOAH,” Dean said, his cheeks flushed, his chest heaving as he struggled for breath as though Sam’s words had physically struck him. “You’re not a parasite, Sam. I’ve never resented you. Ever. You’re…. you’re my brother. I love you. I… hell, I love looking out for you. None of that shit was on _you._ I made my own choices.”

“I know,” Sam sighed. “And I love you for them. But can’t you see? I vomit up all that shit and your first instinct is to try to make _me_ feel better. You’re entitled to resent the intolerable circumstances of our childhood. You can be pissed about what happened without being pissed at _me.”_

“The thing is, Sam. I’m not you. Don’t assume you know how I feel. Just because _you _think our childhood was intolerable, doesn’t mean I do_. _Just because in my shoes you’d feel a certain way, doesn’t mean I feel the _same_ way.”

“Because the man you are was programmed by those experiences,” Sam argued. “Life’s always thrown lemons at you, so you’ve always made lemonade and managed to convince yourself lemonade is something you _like. _ But maybe the truth is that lemonade _sucks. _Maybe it’s time you learned to expect _more_ out of your life than lemonade_.”_

“In the week or so I possibly might survive anyway,” Dean drawled. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that, Sammy.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I had no right to interfere. You’re right. We’re probably all out of time for _anything_, let alone naval gazing about our life choices. I’ll butt out.”

“Yeah, Samantha. Butt out,” Dean said. “What the fuck are we doing standing around talking about _feelings_ like a bunch of schoolgirls? Eye on the prize. Let’s get our heads into the _real _problem and see if we can survive the damned week, huh? Save all your Freudian shit until we’ve got a future to actually worry about.”

“I do not wish to be lemonade,” Castiel announced, his brow furrowed.

Dean threw his hands in the air. “I give up,” he barked. “Your mess, you sort it,” he snapped at Sam/Gabriel and stomped back inside the Roadhouse.

“Ummm,” Sam said, helplessly.

Fortunately, Gabriel took over. “Okay, little bro. Thing is, I have an idea. Dunno if it will pan out. It’s kinda complex, keeps having to change and evolve and is ultimately going to depend on getting a fuck load of ducks in a row. Don’t see why_ you_ can’t be one of the ducks, though. Gotta admit I dunno if any of us will even survive long enough for this idea of mine to get a chance to work anyway. But since Sam opened his big mouth and started this conversation anyway, I may as well keep the verbal diarrhea going and let you in on my big plan.”

###


	76. Predictably unpredictable

“So what do you think?” Gabriel asked.

Castiel considered his words carefully, then said. “It is not an _elegant_ solution.”

“Well, no. I admit it’s more a cobbled-together, seat-of-my-pants, last-ditch, Hail Mary type of thing. But it’s got legs. Just got to get all the players lined up correctly, and they’ll all fall like perfect dominoes. It’ll be beautiful.”

“Several of those ‘players’ aren’t even in Moondoor at this time,” Castiel pointed out. “There are too many unknown variables. Too many people have to make exactly the right choices. You are not omniscient, Gabriel. Your predictions are assumptions. Guesses. People, particularly _human_ people, are not predictable. They are, in fact, bewilderingly chaotic. Their behavior is rarely logical in my experience.”

“Nobody’s omniscient,” Gabriel replied. “But dad and the Reaper have always done a damned good job of faking it because they know that people are predictably _unpredictable_.”

Castiel just blinked at him, his expression somewhere between confusion and annoyance.

“It’s all just game theory,” Gabriel continued blithely. “Life’s just a huge series of _if/or_ questions. The degree with which any future outcome can be accurately predicted has nothing to do with any individual’s personal choices, it’s about the processing power of the Predictor to factor in all of the variables, every single possible _if/or_ outcome, and reach an ultimate conclusion. “

“Yet even Chuck failed to compute the correct conclusion to this current situation and he was considerably more complex a program than yourself,” Castiel pointed out.

“Ahh, but that wasn’t because he was physically incapable of processing the data. He was simply unable to _interpret_ the data correctly. That’s why the Reaper could always run rings around both him and Auntie Amara. And, though I say it myself, I might not have the processing power of an A.I. but I’m a shit hot study of human nature. Plus, I have the current benefit of existing inside Sam’s mind which, surprisingly, is one hell of a fertile ground for growing ideas inside.”

“What the hell do you mean,_ surprisingly_?” Sam protested, flicking his tail irritably.

“Hate to say it, Sam, but meeting you for the first time is like being given a huge, shiny present with a big fat bow on top. You initially think _wowza_, but then you open the box and all you find inside is a stack of dusty, boring, law books. Bit of a let-down, you know? I mean, you’re kinda like six and a half feet of pretty disappointment. But after spending a bit of time in your head, well, your _history_ is far more interesting than your current character and your _potential _is astronomical. So I’m making use of your cool toys. You know, the ones you mostly stopped playing with when you turned all boring and ‘respectable’.”

“You have found a way to daisy-chain your own programming power with Sam’s core?” Castiel enquired, with considerable fascination.

“Exactly. I had no idea what I was missing out on by living inside Emmett’s body. I thought the fact he was braindead was a _bonus._ Boy, was I wrong. Well, maybe not in Emmett’s particular case. Don’t really think his brain capacity would have brought much to the party but, still, that’s possibly unfairly judgemental. I shouldn’t assume his intelligence level based on his choice of career, should I? I mean that’s the same mistake as I made with Sam.”

“Using my own mouth to insult me is not an endearing characteristic, Gabriel,” Sam snarled.

“Truth hurts, huh?” Gabriel snorted.

“Becoming an Attorney was an achievement I am proud of,” Sam snapped.

“Boring and _predictable_,” Gabriel hacked, then grinned smugly. Which was disconcerting since Sam was still simultaneously thumping his tail in temper.

But any further discussion was halted by the door to the Roadhouse banging open and Charlie, Dean and Meg emerging.

“Saddle up,” Dean said, with excessive cheerfulness. “One of the demons came through. We have the location of a knight.”

“Guy named Azazel,” Charlie said, “Still only level 50 which is surprising since I recall him being a sleaze who’d have given Nick a run for his money. I’m surprised he hasn’t tortured his way up to at least level 70 by now.”

“Lack of opportunity,” Meg suggested, reaching down, snatching Sam up despite his indignant yelp and then casually throwing him around her shoulders so that he draped around her like a fur stole. “Little guy’s with me,” she said. Sam, it should be said, made no effort to remove himself, despite his initial protest at the manhandling.

“Yeah, his location would have made leveling up problematic,” Charlie agreed. “He emerged from Purgatory into the Moondoor equivalent of Idaho. It’s barely populated in this world. Um… Castiel, honey, why did you get Goldie out of your inventory? We’ll be _porting_ to Salmon Creek.”

Castiel cocked his head in confusion. “Dean said we should ‘saddle up’.”

Dean casually slapped a companionable arm over his shoulder. “Sorry for the mix-up, buddy,” he said. “I just meant we need to get going sharpish.”

Then he turned and offered a sneer to Sam as though to say, “see, platonic works _fine_ for me, asshole.”

From his position around Meg’s neck, Sam raised one paw. It might have been a mere acknowledgment of Dean’s point; it somehow looked far more like he was flipping the bird.

Dean’s cheerful demeanor lasted perhaps 5 seconds after their arrival in Salmon Creek. Then he turned to Meg with an accusing frown. “Might have been nice if the little bastard had bothered to tell us Azazel wasn’t alone.”

Meg shrugged indifferently. “Not his fault you didn’t ask the right questions. We demons are pretty pedantic. You asked for his location, not his social status.”

“Well, hello darlings,” Crowley said, from his position several feet to their left. He like them was standing well away from the actual field of battle. “Fancy meeting you here, Meglet.”

“He’s already Rank 2,” Charlie hissed at Dean.

“I noticed,” Dean replied. “Son of a bitch.”

“Looks like demonic bosses are like buses,” Crowley agreed, cheerfully enough. “You wait hours and hours and then, suddenly, two come along at once.”

In front of them, inside a huge inverted devil’s trap formed of river stones, stood Azazel. He was surrounded by a small group of bound NPC’s, all of whom looked terrified. All around the edges of the traps demons were tearing into each other like rabid dogs. It was pretty obvious from the general carnage that the demons were split into two factions, those summoned by Azazel against a small army working for Crowley. Because Azazel’s demons were fighting aimlessly, they were being easily dispatched by Crowley’s more organized forces. But, whenever Azazel’s demons were almost completely slaughtered, the Rank 1 boss used his bone dagger to sacrifice one of his hostages and then used the resultant SP to summon more forces.

“He’s an idiot,” Crowley pointed out, looking bored. “He’s wasting all that SP for no purpose whatsoever. He clearly hasn’t figured out I can’t cross the trap-line anyway.”

“You can’t?” Dean asked.

“Oh, look at you. You’re now a Rank 2 Twink. How adorable,” Crowley purred. “But still a moron.”

“I’m getting seriously pissed about people calling me a moron,” Dean snapped. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Surprisingly it was Meg who answered. “You’re a _demonic_ Boss. You can’t cross the trap line now either.”

“Threw your towel in with these guys, huh?” Crowley asked her. “No wonder I couldn’t summon you earlier.”

“I’m on vacation. I just came along for the entertainment,” she replied. “Speaking of which, since neither of you can get inside the trap, you gonna have a throw-down with Twink-boy instead?”

Sam hissed on her shoulder. She just smirked at him unrepentantly.

Crowley narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he looked at Dean, then shrugged easily. “Azazel’s more my size at the moment and he can’t stay inside there _forever. _Besides, as usual, the Twink’s brought a few more to this party than I care to dance with. I _c_ouldn’t live with the embarrassment of getting my ass handed to me _twice_ by pretty boy there. So why don’t you lot just piss off and leave me to it? I was here first. Finders keepers and all that jazz.”

“You wouldn’t have to _live_ with the embarrassment,” Dean told him dryly. “Do me a favor, Meg. Take a momentary break from your vacation and fill _Mr._ Crowley in with the reality of the current situation?”

“Why me?” she demanded. “Why would I want to go anywhere near him? He’s just as likely to stab _me_ as he is you.”

“Apart from the obvious, that he can’t actually _kill_ you; I get the feeling you both understand each other.”

She shrugged nonchalantly. “No skin off my nose. Anyway, he’s only level 200. if he gets uppity, I’ll let Sam here take him out,” she said, patting his head. “Death by pussycat. Now _that_ would be seriously embarrassing.”

Crowley glared at the cat, then his eyes widened as he read Sam’s stats. “That’s impressive,” he purred. “Bring it closer, Meg. I always enjoy petting a pretty girl’s pussy.”

“Gross. I’m gonna gag,” Sam threatened.

“Anyone going to state the obvious?” Charlie said, as Meg and Crowley huddled together and began an information exchange punctuated with the occasional sound of Sam threatening to retch again.

“If the obvious is that I am perfectly capable of walking inside the trap and retrieving Azazel for you, then yes,” Castiel replied calmly.

“Perhaps sooner rather than later,” Dean suggested. “Before he kills the rest of his hostages.”

“Of course,” Castiel agreed, allowing his eyes to flare and solid, substantial wings to spout blackly from his shoulder blades before he strode purposefully through the fighting demons towards the Rank 1 boss.

“I wish he’d stop doing that,” Dean said, as he licked his lower lip. “It’s completely unnecessary showmanship.”

“Yup,” Charlie agreed appreciatively. “Almost makes me wish I was bi.”

“Don’t even think about it. Keep your lady boner to yourself, Charlie. I might not ever get to actually touch him but I sure as hell won’t be sharing him either. Not even for your fantasies.”

“You can’t put dibsies on material for your spank bank,” she said archly.

“Try me.”

“So, um, seriously,” she asked, as they watched Castiel enter the trap, then pause for a while to speak briefly with the level 100 player before appearing to lose patience and stepping forward to easily disarm him. Then, twisting Azazel’s arm up behind his back, Castiel began to frog-march him back towards them. “How do you think this is gonna pan out? Do you honestly think you can convince _both_ of them to join us?”

Dean’s mouth twisted. “I dunno. My gut doesn’t have a good feeling about Azazel, though the way he was slitting the throats of those villagers is probably influencing my opinion. I kinda think Crowley might listen though. I think he’s the type of guy who’ll always play the odds that give him the best chance of personal survival. That’s why I asked Meg to speak to him. She won’t lie or sugar-coat the situation. Neither will she argue on _our_ side. She’ll just lay out the facts as she knows them and, if he’s as pragmatic as I believe him to be, Crowley will make the same decision as she did.”

“And then double-cross you without a second thought when it suits him,” she pointed out.

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “Still, knowing that going in means he won’t get the chance to surprise me later.”

“Then you _need_ Azazel to turn you down,” she said. “I mean, I’m not saying the idea of actually deliberately killing him is okay, obviously, but realistically, I can’t see this working out any other way. You need that Rank 3. Because as long as you and Crowley remain the same rank, he’ll probably jump you the first time you’re alone. I’m pretty sure the only reason he hasn’t attacked you already is the War Party and Castiel’s presence.”

“Which brings up another problem,” Dean said, as he reached to pull his bone dagger from his belt so that he could brandish it threateningly in front of him as Castiel approached with his prisoner. “Azazel is hosting an Angel. Even if I was _willing_ to kill him in cold-blood, Cas isn’t going to be happy with the idea of me murdering one of his brethren.” 

“Shit, this is all so fucked up,” Charlie sighed.

“Yup,” Dean agreed shortly because Castiel had reached them with his prisoner. “Look,” he said, to Azazel, “I don’t know what Cas has already told you but…”

“Don’t bother,” Azazel scoffed, his mouth twisting into a cruel smirk. “Kill me, don’t kill me, I don’t give a shit one way or the other. So don’t bother boring me with all your pathetic hand-wringing. Just get it over with.”

“Huh,” Dean said, surprised by the guy’s attitude. “Look, I don’t want to kill you at all. Between you, me and Crowley here, we have five ranks of power. Stand together and even if Cain gets a First Blade, he can’t grow any larger, can’t beat Amara and, most importantly, can’t reach level 1000. Without that, it’s game over for him. We three, right now, can stop this juggernaut in its tracks just by agreeing _not _to kill each other. Then all we have to do is wait for the game to get reset in a week or two and we can all log out and walk away.”

“He’s right,” Charlie said. “It’s not the cleanest solution but it will still work.”

“You think I want to stop Cain’s ascension?” Azazel laughed. “I joined the game specifically to help Cain ensure he got the levels he needed. Richard assured me that, unlike the rest of you idiots, my own tank was fitted with a failsafe that will create a digital back-up of my identity. What Cain is doing is righteous. He’s reclaiming Moondoor for the _people_ of Moondoor and he will start by eradicating the human beings who pollute this place like vermin.”

“What?” Dean demanded, blinking in shock. “But _you’re _human.”

“I won’t be when Cain revives me to stand at his side as a digital Angel,” Azazel cackled. “I will be the first Angel of the Lord God Cain.”

“It appears this individual is insane,” Castiel announced solemnly, over Azazel’s shoulder. “I cannot ascertain whether it is a medical issue, or due to Cain’s insidious influence or that of my brother Ishim. It appears _both_ vessel and host accepted the role of a Knight of Hell in full knowledge of Cain’s plan. Ishim was apparently never acting under the auspices of our father. He was possibly influenced by his long-standing relationship with Ramiel. Azazel, like Nick, was apparently known to ‘Richard Roman’.”

“I am not insane,” Azazel spat. “Though I don’t expect _you_ to understand. You would never be worthy of understanding. Did you know that when the Mayans played football, it was always the captain of the _winning_ team who was decapitated at the end of the game? A sacrifice to a God is an _honor__._ It has to be earned. I have to_ earn_ my right to stand at Cain’s side eternally.”

“Cain is not a God,” Dean said. “He’s a piece of badly written code with psychotic delusions of grandeur.”

Azazel’s eyes blazed and his profile leaped, suddenly, from level 50 to level 240.

“Oops,” Ishim said. “I really need to learn how to control my temper. Looks like Azazel checked out a little early. My bad. Didn’t actually mean to do that but, oh well.”

“_Was_ there a digital backup for him?” Charlie asked.

Ishim rolled his eyes. “What do you think?” he sneered. “So this is a pretty scenario, isn’t it? Let’s see, two Rank 2 bosses, so both lower in power than me. Looks like I can wrap this whole thing up right now. Then I can send a demon to summon Cain and hand him 500 power levels today.”

“Look again, asshole,” Dean said. “I’m running a war party.”

Ishim stared at him, frowning in confusion as he read the numbers on Dean’s profile.

Which was when Castiel shoved him violently from behind.

It was almost anti-climactic.

Caught off-balance, the angel stumbled forwards and then his eyes opened huge and shocked as his own momentum plunged Dean’s bone dagger into his chest.

**## Level Up ##**

**## You have reached player level 302 ##**

**## Rank Gained ##**

**## BOSS RANK 3 ##**

Dean just felt sick.

He wondered why he felt as bad about killing Ishim as he would have if his knife had taken Azazel’s life. But then he met Castiel’s equally distressed gaze and nodded in sudden understanding. It was impossible to accept Castiel as a ‘person’ without according the exact same rights to all of his brethren.

So, although it had _had_ to be done, neither of them were going to be celebrating the ‘victory’.

“Well,” Crowley said, from behind him. “Looks like it’s a good job the lovely Meg had already persuaded me to join your merry band.”

And, Gabriel raised Sam’s eyes to meet Castiel’s in a blaze of gold. “Told ya,” he said, and winked.


	77. Hotch

Crowley might have decided to ‘join the team’ but he told them in no uncertain terms that he had no intention of ‘getting into bed’ with them. By which he specifically meant sleeping at the Roadhouse.

When he stated his intention to return to Hades City until they had the lead on another Knight’s location, Sam fully expected his brother to object. Dean, though, was perfectly casual about the idea. “Better than me spending the night waiting for him to sneak into my room and stab me,” he said. “Besides, if he’s planning on welshing on the deal, the sooner the better. I don’t want to waste time getting to know him if we’re going to end up dueling to the death. I don’t think it would bother _him, _but I have enough problems with the idea of killing a perfect stranger let alone someone I actually _know_.”

“Dunno,” Sam suggested. “There’s a good chance having a greater acquaintance with _him_ might actually make the idea more attractive.”

Dean snorted. “You’re only saying that because he stole your girlfriend.”

Meg, intrigued by Crowley’s description of his ‘pleasure palace’ Hell, had decided to accompany him back to Hades City since she was ‘on vacation’ anyway. Besides, as she pointed out, her being with Crowley was going to be the easiest way for the two Knights to communicate with each other, since Dean could just summon her back when he wanted them both to return. Dean hadn’t objected to _that_ either. As long as he was the one bankrolling her with his soul points, she couldn’t actively work against him so he had no fear of her being corrupted into working for Crowley against him. Well, not _overtly_ anyway.

Sam didn’t rise to the bait about Meg.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “Didn’t get a chance earlier but it’s kinda important.”

“What’s wrong?” Dean asked worriedly.

“It’s nothing like that. Nothing _wrong_. It’s just, well, Gabe and Cas had a conversation earlier today which, obviously, I overheard and so I need to tell you that I heard it, because I don’t want secrets between us, but I don’t want to repeat what they said to you, either.”

“You’ve lost me,” Dean admitted, “because that sounded like you saying you want to tell me you heard something that you _don’t _want to tell me.”

Sam shrugged awkwardly. “Kinda,” he agreed. “Though I would definitely tell you if I thought you _ought _to hear it. And I kind of do but, at the same time, I think that telling you would be the worst thing I could do under the circumstances.”

“Nope. Still have absolutely no idea what you’re saying.”

“You know how Chuck tried to rig this whole thing from the start? Tried to orchestrate the whole way this panned out, and the way the Reaper kind of did the same thing? Well, Gabriel thinks he’s figured out the whole way it almost certainly _will_ now play out, based on who is left in the game and the choices people will almost inevitably make from now on. Based on their situations, their characters, and their previous behavior. For instance, he was already 99% certain that Crowley would throw his lot in with us before we even went to Salmon Creek today.”

“I’m sick to the back teeth of being a puppet for V.I.’s with a god complex,” Dean spat.

“You misunderstand me. Gabriel isn’t trying to make this happen, he’s just predicting _how _it will happen. Well, that’s not strictly true. He’s using that prediction to try to convince a couple of people to choose _if_ rather than _or_ at certain points in the near future but he’s doing it with full disclosure. He isn’t slyly manipulating anyone. Just laying out the probable outcomes of certain decisions they need to make and letting them decide for themselves which option they prefer.”

“But you don’t want me to tell me which people or what decisions or even a general overview of Gabriel’s ‘predictions’?”

“Basically,” Sam agreed. “Because telling you would probably change the variables all over again. You might start second-guessing yourself. Someone could end up zigging instead of zagging. I swear if we reach a point where I think the information will do more good than harm, I’ll tell you. I just needed to give you the option. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you everything right now.”

“Or I will,” Gabriel interrupted to offer. “But, trust me, it’s better if you know nothing. The whole point is that this needs to play out with you making natural decisions too. Anything I say might change the way you react in a given situation and that could create some kind of cascade effect that might completely screw the pooch.”

“I don’t know you well enough to trust you,” Dean said honestly. “But I trust Sam. Keep your secrets. Just know that if you do anything to hurt me or the people I love, you’ll only live long enough to regret it.”

###

They had barely finished breakfast the next morning before Ash returned to Moondoor.

He didn’t arrive alone.

He came into the Roadhouse with two companions. A stunningly beautiful statuesque woman with long black hair and a gown that hugged a figure so curvaceous that Dean was instantly convinced her whole appearance was the contrived one of a bespoke avatar. The other companion was seven and a half feet of Hobgoblin ugliness.

“Sorry about yesterday,” Ash said, sitting down and helping himself to a piece of leftover toast. “I got bogged down with FBI crap all day. Never got a chance to log back in and, woah, where did you get the extra rank from?”

“I got bogged down with Knight crap. I’ll tell you about it later. So who are your friends?” Dean asked, his tone cautious but not necessarily unfriendly.

“This is Penelope. Better known in game circles as the Black Queen. She’s also the FBI tech support who helped Charlie hack the RRE mainframe a few days ago.”

Charlie squeed happily, jumped up to greet her, paused when she remembered they were supposed to be rivals, then shrugged and followed through with her original impulse to hug the other woman. “What are you doing here? We’re kind of depending on you to get my hack loaded to get us out of this darned game.”

“I’ve got it covered,” Penelope assured her. “The minute the courts acknowledge Campbell Holdings as the rightful owners of RRE, I’ve got someone competent ready to run in and upload your program onto their mainframe. Can’t do it myself anyway, since I’ve been suspended.”

“Suspended?”

“I followed Ash’s advice and piggybacked onto the server from Richard Roman’s personal laptop late Sunday night. It was very informative. Got the information you wanted _and _a shitload more evidence that has finally gotten at least _some _of the FBI’s attention. Sadly, since I didn’t have a specific court order permitting me to do it, or the upload we did earlier to protect the rig players, my boss, who’s a bit of a stickler for red tape, thanked me for the info then kicked my ass and filed a formal reprimand. So I got suspended.”

“It’s a _temporary_ suspension,” the hobgoblin grunted.

“It’s a damned _suspension,”_ Penelope snarked back.

“Hang on,” Dean interrupted. “You saved a bunch of folks, got some necessary evidence and your boss fired you for it? What a dick.”

“I thought so,” Penelope agreed.

The hobgoblin grunted unhappily.

“So who’s your friend?” Dean inquired.

“Oh, meet the dick,” she said. “This is Aaron Hotchner. My boss. Possibly ex-boss. Most people call him Hotch.”

“Or _dick_,” Ash snarled with uncharacteristic malice.

“Hotch is very familiar with Moondoor,” Penelope explained. “You probably heard his name before. He’s the Guildmaster of the Dogs of War.”

“Didn’t _you_ used to be a member of the Dogs of War?” Dean asked Ash. “Weren’t they the guys who booted your ass and gave you a permanent 5% debuff?”

“Yup and yup,” Ash agreed bitterly and, suddenly, his malice towards ‘Hotch’ made sense.

“So at least you’re _consistently _a dick,” Dean told the Hobgoblin with a smirk. “Gotta say I’m surprised a level 69 Guildmaster is using such a shitty generic avatar.”

“My usual avatar was specifically designed for use with an immersion tank,” Hotch explained. “Under the circumstances, I was hardly going to use it for this visit and I was in a hurry this morning, so I just chose one at random. I possibly should have paid more attention to my choice,” he admitted ruefully.

“Ooh…. you sayin’ you’re a believer now, huh? Aren’t you the guy who’s been blocking Victor Hendrickson’s calls for a couple of weeks?”

The hobgoblin shuffled his feet awkwardly. “You have to admit the whole story sounded insane,” he argued defensively.

“Tosser,” Sam coughed.

Hotch startled visibly at the talking cat before frowning sulkily at the highly verbal collective decision that he was an idiot. “Look,” he said. “I play this game _seriously_, which should be enough indication that I don’t lack imagination. However, like the majority of my colleagues, I base my decisions on _facts_ rather than wild speculations. It is only in the last 24 hours or so that the _facts_ have somewhat supported Victor’s assertions.”

“What he actually means is we’ve hit something totally inexplicable unless there is _something _seriously hinky going on inside RRE, and by association Moondoor, although Hotch still draws the line on believing any of the game’s V.I.’s are truly sentient. He thinks, as do most of our higher-ups, that some particularly clever individual has somehow orchestrated this whole thing by programming the V.I.’s to turn into ‘killer robots’ or some such shit,” Penelope drawled. “He already has an unsub in mind. The whole purpose of his visit today is to confirm his suspicions that the mastermind of this whole shit show is…”

“One more word Garcia and you can forget the suspension because I’ll be arresting you _too_,” Hotch snapped.

“Oh suck an egg,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Haven’t you figured out there’s a reason I’m in a bespoke avatar yet? What kind of profiler are you?”

The hobgoblin visibly blanched. “I assumed you were just demonstrating your hacking skills,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you _actually_ used your immersion rig to log-in, Penelope.”

“When have you ever known me to do things by halves?” she countered. “I decided to stack the odds. I like to think that even if our friendship didn’t stop you suspending my ass, you still won’t stand by and let me actually _die_ in this game.”

“You’ve deliberately trapped yourself in here with us?” Charlie asked, her expression torn between impressed and horrified.

“Figured you guys needed all the help you could get. Plus, I hoped it might focus the attention of _some_ people on dealing with the _real _issue instead of trying to fit the facts into convenient little preconceived assumptions. Also, I can’t be arrested now any more than you can, Sam.”

“Me?” Sam yelped, his eyes flaring gold with alarm.

She smirked at the tiny cat. “Ah, it _is _you in there. Thought as much. Hotch, meet Samuel Winchester, the evil mastermind of this entire situation and cunning feline master of disguise.” She rolled her eyes sarcastically, then winked at Sam.

Hotch looked visibly shaken by the idea that Sam was the _cat,_ but still manfully squared his shoulders. “Samuel Winchester, I am here to question you with regard to…”

“Hang on while I consult my lawyer,” Gabriel said, his voice so substantially different to Sam’s that Hotch frowned with confusion.

“He’s here to question me, not you,” Sam retorted.

“Then _you_ need a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer.”

“You can’t be your own lawyer.”

“I don’t _want _a lawyer.”

“Trust me, if dick-for-brains here is gunning for you, a lawyer is a _need_ not a _want_.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Hotch demanded. “Is he bipolar? Hmmm. That would explain a lot.”

“The annoying _squeaky _one is the Archangel Gabriel,” Charlie snorted. “Who is currently sharing Sam’s avatar. He’s also a sentient and _very_ real V.I. who is powerful enough to smite your tiny level 69 ass right out of this game, so I suggest you apologize very quickly and amend your attitude accordingly.”

“Gabriel isn’t the one you should be worried about,” Dean snarled, standing and stepping forward between Sam and Hotch. “I don’t know what your problem is, dickhead, but you wanna talk to someone, talk to me.”

Hotch read Dean’s profile and power level and swallowed visibly. He spread his hands out in a peaceful gesture. “You’re Dean Winchester, right? The older brother. The one who’s…um…”

“A cripple, yeah, let’s not mince words. You’re in _my _world now, asshole, and there’s sure as shit nothing wrong with my legs here. So let’s cut the shit and either tell me why the fuck you think my _brother_ is some kind of evil mastermind or just fuck off before I demonstrate _exactly _what a level 302 demonic boss is capable of.”

“I think we’ve all gotten off on the wrong foot,” Hotch said, offering a deliberately pacifying smile. Since he did it with the face of a Hobgoblin, his success was minimal at best.

“Yeah, well that’s what happens when some shit-for-brains ponces in hurling accusations at my brother.”

“I haven’t accused anyone of anything. I just want to ask him some questions.”

“Fuck off,” Dean snarled.

“Um, guys, I don’t think this is helping,” Charlie said.

“Let him ask his damned questions,” Sam snapped. “It’s not like I’ve done anything wrong, so what harm can it do?”

“Are you _seriously_ a lawyer?” Gabriel demanded. “Cos, if so, your naivety is fucking scary. ‘What harm can it do?’ Did those words seriously come out of _our_ mouth?”

Hotch blinked at the cat, then shook his head in complete bemusement. “I have no fucking idea what I’ve walked in on here,” he admitted. “How about we just start again. I ditch _all _of my preconceived assumptions and we take it from the top?”

“Finally,” Penelope said with satisfaction. “He’s _actually_ a damned fine investigator usually,” she assured them all, “but you’ve got to admit that this whole situation is so far beyond anyone’s comfort zone that looking for a more mundane and logical solution was a natural reaction and given Richard Roman’s public profile, Hotch is under an unbelievable amount of pressure from the top to try to wrap this up before the media get even more involved.”

“By pointing fingers at my brother,” Dean growled menacingly, clearly unwilling to simply ‘start again’.

“Look, in cases of homicide suspicion always naturally turns to whoever has the most to gain. As the owners of Campbell Holdings, both you and Sam are obviously the primary suspects. Under the circumstances, Sam was the more likely candidate,” Hotch said.

“Because I’m a cripple?” Dean snarled.

“Because he’s the sm… um… one with the access to RRE,” Hotch corrected, though he flushed as he said it.

“I believe he almost said ‘because he’s the _smart_ one’,” Gabriel chirped cheerfully.

“Yup,” Ash agreed. “I agree. The dickhead just tried to call you a moron, Dean. That’s getting to be a pattern around here these days. I wouldn’t take it any longer if I were you. I think you should at least break a leg or two to teach him some manners.”

Dean just snorted at him. “Fight your own battles, Ash. I don’t _care_ what he thinks of me since he is clearly a moron himself.” He turned to address Hotch directly. “Sam was nine years old when Roman died. And a short, scrawny little fucker to boot. Unless you’re suggesting Sam spent his childhood running around pretending to be Damien from the Omen, I can’t see you getting any jury to believe _that_ scenario.”

“Oooh,” Penelope cooed. “Now _that’s_ interesting. You see the problem everyone has out in_ our_ world at the moment is that when they opened Roman’s tank and found his body it was, well, like something out of a horror movie. Really cool, but a bit pukey. I’m not actually that good with the gory stuff to be honest. See, the security cameras in his apartment corridor picked up the fact he walked perfectly normally into that room on Friday morning. Bit pale maybe. Bit stiff. But nothing out of the ordinary for _him. _ By Sunday night, when we opened the tank up, Roman wasn’t only dead, he was in some _seriously_ advanced stage of putrefaction. The coroner says the only explanation is that Roman must have been dead for some considerable time, months at the least, and stored somewhere, like a freezer unit, and then allowed to defrost in the tank. Only that would require not only someone to have masterfully doctored the security feeds in his apartment for _months _but also the collusion of every single individual who has claimed to have interacted with him recently. And although Roman had become rather reclusive over the last few years, he still had a lot of different visitors. Several of them prominent political figures. So, yeah, it’s a mess.”

“His body has been sent for extensive testing,” Hotch admitted. “It will take several days, at least, to get a more accurate prediction of his true date of death. Fifteen years, however, is completely out of the question. Until four or five years ago, Roman still traveled extensively and attended a number of public conferences as a speaker. He was seen, and filmed, on stage with audiences of hundreds in attendance.”

“Yeah,” Charlie mused. “I guess if you can’t accept the idea of sentient V.I.’s, the whole Cain/Roman situation looks dodgy as fuck. Still, I don’t see how that puts either Sam or Dean into the frame. The fact is that the Campbell Holdings' claim on the company is water-tight. They didn’t need Roman to _die_ for them to take over the company. In fact, if I were them I would have taken considerable pleasure in watching the look on ’Roman’s’ face when a judge ordered him to give back the company he had _stolen_ from them.”

“Point,” Ash stated. “Your supposed motive is bogus, Hotch.”

The hobgoblin ground his teeth in frustration but conceded the point with a heavy sigh. “Okay,” he admitted heavily. “I guess I was grasping. But the idea of a sentient V.I. taking over Roman’s body is so far out-there that _nobody_ sane is ever going to buy it.”

“So you say, but there’s a room full of _seriously _smart guys in here and _we_ all buy it,” Charlie pointed out drolly. “So unless you’re calling us all insane, how would you explain _that?”_

“Mass hysteria would be plausible,” Castiel suggested helpfully.

“Um, you’re supposed to be arguing on _our _side,” Dean pointed out.

“Oh,” Castiel said. “I apologize.”

“This is the Seraph Angel Castiel. Also a V.I.,” Charlie told Hotch cheerfully. “He’s young and idealistic and clearly hasn’t yet pegged you for an asshole. I suggest you foster the relationship carefully though. If he figures out you’ve got your knives out for the Winchesters, he’s liable to smite first and question later.”

“You are an _enemy_ of Dean and Sam?” Castiel demanded, clearly not having had the context to follow the earlier conversation adequately. “If you attempt to harm them, I will burn you to ash.”

“You’re a V.I.?” Hotch demanded increduously.

“I am,” Castiel agreed.

Hotch pursed his lips. “I admit I can’t tell the difference just by talking to him,” he told the others, “but that doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean, all the common and garden NPC’s appear sentient enough when I’m in Moondoor too. A bit of pretty programming only makes them _seem_ real. I understand a desire to anthropomorphize such sophisticated programs as Castiel here, but that doesn’t actually make them genuinely sentient.”

“Bullshit. The acceptance of sentience in non-humans is not a new concept,” Dean retorted. “There are currently a number of worldwide law amendments being made to accept _animals_ as sentient because the ability to feel is enough criteria for sentience and yet there isn’t a country on Earth that has set out a formal definition in Law, to date, of what sentience actually _means_. It sure as hell hasn’t ever been legally determined that sentience belongs only to human beings. What’s more relevant here is that people like Cas and Gabriel are _sapient. _They aren’t only capable of feelings, they have the demonstrable ability to think and act independently with the use of knowledge, experience, understanding and insight. What legally makes them _people_ is their self-awareness. The fact they’re formed of digital code rather than DNA has no bearing on whether they are _real_ or not. No law exists that categorically states it is a requirement to be flesh and blood to be considered a person.

“Bottom line is that there are _no_ laws anywhere in our world at this time that specifically demand a person has to be _human _to be accorded ‘human’ rights. And you can argue that is due to a failure of lawmakers to even consider the possibility of people existing who are _not _human, but that’s not _legally_ relevant, is it? The law does not allow for us to simply _assume_ what definitions law-makers might have chosen to apply, had they considered such aspects when writing those laws. The law is _the law_ until such time as the law is changed once more. In the meantime, everyone is obliged to act under the law as it stands. The fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution specifically says “All _persons_,” not ‘all humans’. Not even a single line of the European Convention on Human Rights is specifically worded to define _people_ as ‘human’, despite its name. And Article 2 of that convention states, ‘_Everyone’s _right to life shall be protected by law’.

“Like it or not, the law is wielded as a precise instrument and the law, as it stands, in the country in which the FBI has jurisdiction, currently accords the same protections to Cas and Gabriel and all the other V.I.’s here as it does any _human_ people. It isn’t their responsibility to prove to you they are _people. _You’re the one here obliged to prove that they aren’t. It’s not good enough to simply _assume_ they don’t qualify. That makes you no different from all the white Americans who justified black slavery with the declaration that the slaves were not ‘fully human’. That they were fundamentally ‘inferior’. Trust me, Mr. Hotchner, history will judge you, and people like you, just as harshly as _those _bigots should you attempt to justify your position with the bogus argument that these virtual intelligences are ‘inferior’ simply because they are different. Penelope justified your suspension of her by saying you’re a ‘stickler for the rules’. I therefore expect you to be as diligent about enforcing the _laws_ that protect the V.I.’s of Moondoor.”

Hotch blinked at him with astonishment. “So your argument is that I am not only supposed to believe they are ‘people’ but accord them the protection of the United States Legal System simply on the basis that _you_ claim they are ‘people’?”

“Nope. I am saying until you can ‘prove’ they _aren’t ‘_people’, the obligation to deal with them in that fashion resides within the office you hold,” Dean stated firmly. “If you don’t like it, get the lawmakers to change the law or change your career.”

“See,” Charlie said. “Dean isn’t _just_ a pretty face, either. Oh, and he’s also eidetic. So if he says the laws don’t exist to support your argument, Hotch, you can believe he knows what he’s talking about.”

“What she said,” Gabriel agreed heartily. “Although I gotta say, Deano, that was a completely out of character and remarkably erudite argument on your part. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume you’d just _deliberately_ thrown away your normal protective camouflage and revealed your true nerd credentials simply to move the target off Sam’s back and onto your own instead.”

“The thought had crossed my mind too,” Hotch said, with a wry smile. “And I should also point out that there’s a huge difference between you convincing me of the way the Law possibly regards the possibility of V.I. sentience and _me_ actually believing in it.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck whether you believe it or not,” Dean replied with brutal honesty. “I just want you to feel obligated to at least consider the possibility when investigating the _facts_ of this situation. As long as you don’t dismiss the possibility out of hand, the facts will eventually speak for themselves.

“It’s the old Sherlock Holmes adage,” Charlie agreed cheerfully. “When you eliminate the impossible, and all that. Just don’t make the mistake of considering our story _impossible _when it’s merely highly improbable.”

“Merely,” Hotch repeated, but his tone was more amused than mocking. “One other point of order though. The law is a two-edged sword. You do realize that if you somehow manage to convince the powers that be that your friends here are entitled to legal protection, then your own actions will be open to potential prosecution? You can’t claim rights for the ‘good’ V.I.’s without those same rights being accorded to characters like Cain too. Be very careful to ensure your actions here will withstand later scrutiny.” Somehow, without his stern expression changing, he managed to make the comment sound more like honestly helpful advice than a threat.

“Duly noted,” Dean agreed with his own wry smile.

He and Hotch regarded each other solemnly for a while, then both visibly relaxed a little as if they had reached an unspoken agreement to offer each other the benefit of the doubt.

“So, it’s safe to assume that since you’re aware of the problem with the immersion tanks that you’ve taken steps to keep more people from logging into the game?” Ash asked.

“Or people stuck in tanks from being physically extracted whilst their minds are still stuck in-game,” Charlie added.

“A decision was made that a public announcement of the game itself being dangerous would be counterproductive,” Penelope said. “There was always the danger that instead of being a deterrent, it would attract a certain type of personality to actually deliberately be tempted to play it. Besides, the majority of players use rigs so they aren’t going to be at risk at all. So, instead, the CDC has released a statement suggesting the tanks themselves have developed a serious health risk. They’ve invented some illness that’s a cross between Legionnaires and Sars. The media have lapped it up so the word should spread quickly.”

“Smart,” Charlie said. “The threat of a disease is far more plausible anyway. There’s always been a level of concern expressed within the game blogs regarding the hygiene of the immersion gel, so I can see people lapping the story up.”

“We’re arranging medical teams to be sent out whenever someone reports the location of an immersion tank containing a trapped player,” Hotch added, “but a lot of gamers are self-isolating loners, with no one to report where they are, so realistically our best-case scenario is getting Charlie’s program loaded to allow people to log out again. That’s why our main priority at the moment is to get the ownership of RRE established. Since Sam helpfully pre-signed permissions for us to access all systems the minute Campbell Holdings takes over, it should be a faster option than attempting to get warrants on such bizarre grounds.”

“Very helpful of him, considering he’s an evil Bond villain,” Dean drawled.

“I thought we were past that,” Hotch said tiredly.

“_You_ might be,” Dean grumbled. “I’m gonna hold a grudge a bit longer.”

“Whilst we’re talking, perhaps you would help me with _something,_” Hotch said to Sam. “What can you tell me about Robert Singer?”

“Who?” Sam said innocently.

Hotch rolled his eyes. “Don’t bother. We already know he’s the Guildmaster of the Hunters and we’re almost certain your body is physically located at his property right now. But we can’t locate you or _any_ computer equipment at all there except for an ancient laptop running windows 3.1. I can’t get a warrant for a more thorough search, but we _know_ there has to be a concealed room somewhere in that house.”

“Surprised you got a warrant at all,” Sam said. “The guy’s a disabled war hero, after all.”

“Yeah, well that’s another hinky thing,” Penelope said. “Because there was a break-in at a certain Law office very early yesterday morning. Well, I _say_ break-in, though the person in question simply walked in the front door and sailed blithely through a highly sophisticated security system without any difficulty whatsoever. Then he left a half-hour later wheeling a huge server on a dolly and disappeared again. The funny thing is that according to our facial recognition software, the person who _walked _into that building was Robert Singer. But, of course, that isn’t physically possible, is it?”

Dean snorted with laughter. “No wonder you look so constipated,” he told Hotch. “You absolutely _know _the only explanation for Robert Singer being able to walk is if the rest of our story is true. Without accepting the rest of it, you can’t do fuck all about him, can you?” He turned to Sam. “Looks like the Reaper has decided to baton down the hatches, huh? He’s obviously preparing for endgame and getting himself out of the line of fire.”

Then he turned back to Hotch and his expression was suddenly a lot more reconciliatory. “Look, man, I get it. It’s a lot to take in. It’s not like any of us accepted this stuff lying down. Thing is, though, whether you believe any of the rest of it or not, the unarguable fact is that there are a lot of people stuck in Moondoor at the moment. Not as many as there might have been, thanks to Charlie and Penelope, so you should be kissing that girl’s ass, rather than suspending it, but still… if Cain, or whoever _you_ believe is running that avatar, gets his way, those people are going to _die_ before you manage to get them logged out again. So like us or not, trust us or not, we’re your best bet at trying to keep those guys alive. So work with us, not against us. And, if at the end of this you need _someone_ to blame, _someone_ to arrest, well, if I make it through this, feel free to arrest _me. _ I don’t care. The idea of still being alive enough to even get thrown in jail feels like a bonus to me at the moment.”

“Penelope told me you had a hero complex,” Hotch replied dryly. “How about we just play it by ear and see where we stand when the dust settles?”

“Works for me,” Dean said. “Though, speaking of heroes… there is _one_ guy who genuinely deserves the term. If it wasn’t for the sacrifice _he_ made, this would already have gone totally South. His name’s James Novak and he’s the guy who took out Chuck, even knowing it would write his own death sentence. I was trying to get hold of him in our world, but his family’s apparently rich as shit and they blocked me completely.”

“James Novak? Are you talking about _Senator_ Naomi Novak’s son?” Hotch asked.

“Am I?” Dean asked, with a bewildered shrug.

“That’s him,” Penelope answered cheerfully. “The one with leukemia. Would probably look peculiarly like Castiel here, if he wasn’t so ill.”

“Then, yeah, that’s him,” Dean agreed. “Can you… um… use your superpowers to get a message through to him? Tell him thanks. Tell him I’m trying not to let him down. That I’m doing my best to make his decision worthwhile? I’d do it myself, but I kinda got the impression he doesn’t have time to wait for me to manage to get out of this game again.”

Hotch looked at him thoughtfully. “Promise to look after Penelope, and I’ll see what I can do,” he agreed.

“Of course,” Dean agreed. “You didn’t need to ask.”

The hobgoblin’s face scrunching into a frown for a moment, but then cleared. “No,” he agreed. “Perhaps I didn’t,” he said, and logged out of the game without bothering to say goodbye.

“Well, that went well, maybe?” Dean said questioningly.

“I think so,” Penelope said. “I know he comes across as a hard-ass but he’s actually a really nice guy underneath.”

“Very, very far underneath,” Ash muttered bitterly.

“Anyway, I got the locations for you. Although, obviously, they’re a day out of date now. Which, judging by your own rank up, Dean, can be a lot of time in this world,” she continued.

“Things are definitely starting to move at speed,” Dean agreed.

She filled them all in with what she had learned from the RRE server.

“Damn,” Dean cursed, when she told them about Cain leveling up yet again.

“So where are we at in light of Penelope’s information?” Charlie asked Ash who, as usual, was writing notes down on his parchment scrolls.

“Dean’s taken out Lilith and Azazel, so he’s Rank 3. Crowley killed Asmodeus, and is Rank 2. Abaddon killed Magnus, then was killed by Cain. So Cain became Rank 3, then he took out Belial yesterday, so he’s now Rank 4. So the only remaining Knight, Dagon, is still Rank 1. If Cain gets to Dagon first and takes her out, he qualifies for a first blade. If Dean gets to her first, we get a temporary impasse. Two Rank fours and whichever of you kills Crowley becomes Rank 6 and wins by default. Or you protect Crowley long enough for the hack to be uploaded, you both log out and Cain gets stuck in-game as a rank 4 demonic boss,” Ash summarized.

“That doesn’t resolve the Amara situation though,” Charlie pointed out. “She won’t leave Moondoor if Cain is still alive.”

“Who knows, maybe we can still convince Amara to leave anyway seeing as Cain will be relatively harmless. He won’t be able to become a ‘god’, will he?” Sam offered.

“Dunno, I can’t see him just accepting the situation. He’ll just start plotting a _new_ Armageddon. Might take him another fifteen years. Might take him fifty. But unless we deal with him now, all we’re doing is delaying the inevitable. And Amara knows that,” Dean said.

“So we need to hope Dagon is still in Weirwood and that Cain hasn’t already gotten there first,” Charlie concluded.

“Time to ‘saddle up’ again,” Castiel announced, looking proud he’d remembered the phrase.

“What did I tell you about air quotes?” Dean grumbled good-naturedly as he rose to join him.

“Are they… um?” Penelope asked Charlie, thoughtfully, as the pair led the way out of the Roadhouse, Dean’s arm slung casually over the angel’s shoulder.

Charlie frowned unhappily. “It’s complicated,” she said, and shrugged.

Penelope nodded her understanding. “Yeah, can see how it would be,” she agreed.


	78. Dagon

“Woah,” Dean muttered, as he checked his own stats when the group assembled outside the Roadhouse and activated the War Party prior to porting to Weirwood. “Where the fuck did I get 178 extra levels from? Penelope is only level 48, so with Meg and Crowley both adding themselves to the party this time, thanks guys by the way, I should be reading 390, not 478. Unless… damn… I just realized at Rank 3, I’m finally the strongest member of the war party, now. Even bigger than Cas. So that means I finally qualify to gain a full 20% of Group strength as the Leader. That explains it. Cool.”

“Very cool. It means the War Party now almost compensates entirely for Cain’s extra 190 levels,” Charlie said, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Assuming you kill Dagon today and level up to Rank 4, you’ll be 578 against his 590. Which _has_ to be enough, considering how much more proficient a fighter you are.” Then her face fell a little. “On the other hand, if you just pull her into the War Party instead of ganking her, you’ll only get 20 levels. So you’ll still be 92 levels short of his current 590.”

“I’m not killing someone just to solve a math problem,” Dean replied dryly.

Charlie flushed with mortification. “Obviously not saying you _should._ Just pointing out you _could. _You know… um… hypothetically._”_

“Do you know anything about this Dagon character?” Gabriel asked. He, and Sam, were slung around Penelope’s neck, much the same way as the cat had ridden Meg the day before. Meg hadn’t said anything about Sam’s apparent fickleness but was occasionally giving Penelope an annoyed glare from the corner of her eye. Dean didn’t care if the demon’s nose had been put out of joint by the transfer of Sam’s loyalties. Served her right for running off with Crowley the night before. Still, if he’d known being a cat made all the pretty girls fight over you, he would have chosen a Cat avatar himself rather than a goblin one, back when he still played Moondoor for _fun._

“Not really,” Charlie said. “I never worked on her account. All I know is she’s English and her name is Abigail Taylor.”

“But she’s been living in the US recently in a NY hotel suite under the pseudonym Bela Talbot,” Penelope added.

“Must be a pretty high-end hotel to allow a guest to install an immersion tank,” Dean pointed out.

“It is. She was staying long-term at The Langham, on Fifth Avenue,” Penelope agreed. “For the money she was paying, I doubt they would have objected to her installing a dancing elephant in the suite.”

Sam whistled. “Rich bitch, huh?”

“Considering what else she was keeping in her hotel room, it’s far more likely she made a career of _preying_ on rich bitches,” Penelope said. “There was a lot of high-end jewelry and artwork in that suite, and very little of it had been procured legally. As far as we can tell, Abigail Taylor, or Bela Talbot, made a very nice living as some kind of international high-end thief. We can’t work out her motivations for accepting a ‘job’ as a Knight but Hotch thinks maybe she was planning a scam on Roman and using this to get close to him. My friend Reid, on the other hand, thinks she just had an Alpha personality and couldn’t resist the challenge to best all the other Knights.”

“How do you know so much about her?” Charlie asked, looking impressed.

“She was one of Victor’s ‘finds’,” Penelope admitted. “He worked out her identity a couple of days ago. He’s proven himself to be one hell of an Agent. Instead of giving up when he kept hitting his head against a brick wall, he just kept doggedly investigating until he came up with one heck of a stack of evidence regarding the identities and real-world locations of several of the Knights including Bela. He claims the ‘Reaper’ helped him via Robert Singer. Something that Hotch, obviously, has an issue with believing. Anyway, unfortunately, Victor didn’t get the information in time in Dagon’s case. Housekeeping had already become concerned enough to break into her suite and Victor got there too late to prevent a team of paramedics from pulling her out of her immersion tank.”

“When you say ‘too late’, I’m assuming you mean that literally, given you’ve been referring to her activities in the past tense,” Dean said wryly.

“So far, it doesn’t appear possible to reconnect a body with its consciousness once it’s been severed, even if you put it back in the tank almost straight away,” Penelope agreed. “Obviously, efforts are continuing to try to save the people who’ve already been pulled out of their tanks but, at this stage, it looks as though their minds, like Bela’s, are stuck in Moondoor permanently.”

“Woah, bummer for her,” Ash said. “Still, makes it easier to deal with Dagon, doesn’t it? I mean, realistically, she’s dead _already.”_

“So’s my mom,” Dean pointed out. “She’s in exactly the same position, except there isn’t even a body left to _try _to reconnect her with. That doesn’t mean her life is no longer valuable to _her. _Besides, it’s possible that the V.I.’s like Cas, or at least Archangels like Gabriel, might be able to help any trapped players like Bela to reconnect with their bodies. I think we’ve barely tapped the surface of what the V.I.s are capable of.”

“Wouldn’t know where to start,” Gabriel said.

“We will, however, endeavor to assist,” Castiel stated firmly, with a glare in Gabriel’s direction.

Gabriel rolled Sam’s eyes in response but didn’t deny it.

“Thank you,” Dean said, sincerely. “That’s all I ask. That you _try._” Then he turned back to Ash, “So, no, I am not simply going to ‘deal’ with her as though she is already dead. As long as there is a chance for her to survive and get home again, we act accordingly.”

“I can’t believe my life hangs in the balance and my survival depends on Dudley-do-right here,” Crowley groaned. “For fuck’s sake, can’t you just get with the program? This _is _a fucking math problem. Just gank the silly bitch already and we can go fight Cain together and then go home.”

“We offer her the same deal I offered you,” Dean snapped. “That’s how it’s going to go down. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Just fuck off back to ‘Hell’ and sit this whole shit out from here on in.”

Crowley opened his mouth to argue but it was Penelope, unexpectedly, who said, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Mr. MacLeod. If Dean wasn’t a ‘Dudley-do-right’, you wouldn’t even still be here to argue with him, would you?”

“So, how do you know my name, sweetheart?” Crowley asked, and although his tone was casually flirty, his eyes were cold and hard as he narrowed his gaze on her.

“Fergus Roderick Macleod,” she replied. “The brain behind a highly lucrative on-line sex emporium. Pretty impressive resume, if you’re into that sort of thing. You’d be amazed at what information I retrieved off the RRE server. My boss is _really _interested in the whole ‘Hell’ business model you’ve apparently created inside Moondoor. Weird isn’t it? For every huge technological leap mankind makes, there’s always someone with the ability to capitalize on it for immoral purposes.”

“Sneer all you like. Whether you have a problem with my morals or not, ‘Hell’ is perfectly legal.”

“Only because technology has advanced faster than the law,” she countered. “Something that will definitely be addressed now you’ve helpfully highlighted the need for _new_ Laws on this particular matter. But you’re right for _now. _Selling virtual sex like you do, however immoral, is not illegal.”

He smirked at her.

“Failing to pay correct taxes on that legal, if immoral, business falls totally into a different category, however,” she continued cheerfully. “The FBI has already passed your file to the IRS. I’m sure they’ll be in touch shortly, assuming you ever wake up in our world again.”

“It’s how they took down Al Capone too,” Ash advised them all helpfully.

###

“This is beginning to feel like déjà vu,” Castiel growled, with a frown of irritation, as he used his ‘angel mojo’ to heal the gaping wound in Dean’s shoulder. “How many times will it take before you learn not to ever turn your back on another Knight?”

“She said ‘yes’,” Dean pointed out, a little sulkily.

Castiel dropped his voice to a near whisper but continued to scold Dean as he continued healing him.

“Of course I said ‘yes’,” Dagon snapped. “Faced with a whole bunch of overpowered goons like you lot, I didn’t have much choice.”

“And then you stabbed Dean in the back two minutes later,” Charlie snarled.

“Well, duh,” she said, unrepentantly. “If it had worked, I would have instantly been bigger than any of you. It was worth a shot.”

“And how did that work out for you?” Gabriel sneered. “Because from where I’m sitting, all you’ve bought yourself is the opportunity to spend the next few weeks chained up in a beer cellar.”

“Forget the beer cellar,” Crowley suggested. “I have several far more interesting dungeons that she can stay in. I don’t call it ‘Hell’ simply because it looks good on my business cards.”

“Look, you can’t blame a girl for trying. I gave it a go. I failed. So okay, fair enough. I’ll join you. I promise I mean it this time.” She offered them a winning smile and pointedly returned her bone dagger to its sheath.

Dean and Castiel ignored her, still busy arguing in whispers.

“Nuh, huh. Hand it over,” Crowley snorted.

“I hardly think so,” she snapped. “I’m not stupid enough to disarm myself.”

“That’s the deal, take it or leave it,” Crowley drawled. “Dean here is a ‘gentleman’ so he might even _still _be naïve enough to accept that whole ‘my word is my bond’ shtick. But me, I’ve been around the block a few times and I know perfectly well your word is worth diddly squat. So here’s how it’s gonna work. You hand over your blade and, if you’re lucky, maybe Prince Charming here is still going to be stupid enough to let you join the gang. Refuse and I’ll take you out myself. I’m fucked if I’m gonna spend the next however long waiting for you to slit _my_ throat.”

“Fuck this,” Dean said, stepping away from Cas now his shoulder was fully healed and activating his sigil so that it blazed on his arm.

Penelope winced and half-closed her eyes, fully expecting Dean to kill the treacherous Rank 1 boss where she stood. Despite her own loathing of violence, not to mention her aversion to the idea of murder, she wasn’t even sure she’d blame him for doing it under the circumstances.

Instead, Dean’s arm shot out, his hand empty, his brow furrowed with concentration, and Dagon’s blade leaped up out of its sheath and flew to land in Dean’s hand. “I’m tired of talking,” he said, stashing the blade in his inventory with the others.

Dagon’s eyes flared with alarmed shock at his effortless telekinesis. “Give that back,” she demanded. “How the hell am I supposed to protect myself without a weapon, you asshole? I take it back. I’m not joining your stupid War Party at all now. You’ll get _nothing_ from me. Give me my damned knife back right now or…”

“Do you have gags in your dungeons?” Gabriel asked Crowley.

“You can’t make me leave with you anyway,” Dagon pointed out. “I don’t have any ports and you can’t _make_ me join your guild to accept one-off you. Besides, even if you could, you couldn’t stop me using it to port somewhere else. So you’re stuffed. Clearly, you don’t have the balls to kill me. So just stop farting around and let me go already.”

“There are 206 bones in an adult human body,” Castiel announced, his eyes blazing with arctic fire. “I believe a broken bone inside an avatar is as painful as that in a fleshly body. I may be mistaken though. Perhaps, in the name of scientific experimentation, we could endeavor to discover whether it is true. Which bone would you prefer me to begin with?”

“Woah, that’s cold, man,” Ash breathed gleefully. “Remind _me_ never to stab your boyfriend.”

Dagon scrambled backward in panic as the wrathful angel approached her, his expression implacable, his eyes glowing with angelic fire.

“Cas,” Dean said. Just one word but it stopped Castiel in his tracks. “Just do the other thing we discussed, okay?”

Castiel glowered and his jaw jutted defiantly.

“Please,” Dean added quietly.

With a huff of disappointment, Castiel scowled and let his wings unfurl before grabbing hold of Dagon and shooting up in the air, to the accompaniment of her terrified screams, and disappearing nearly out of view with just a couple of downbeats of his huge wingspan.

“He’ll meet us at Hades City,” Dean said, in case anyone had missed the point.

And Crowley, who had been looking disgruntled at the entire situation brightened considerably at the idea of finally having a _real_ prisoner in his dungeons.

“Still,” Charlie said, “She’s right. We can’t make her join the War Party and you kinda need her 20 levels to fight Cain.”

“I don’t think there’s a vast difference between him being 92 levels higher than me or 112 levels. Either way, he’ll still kick my butt. But maybe I don’t need to fight him at all. We’ve done what we set out to do. We’ve secured 6 ranks, keeping him at 4 and so we’ve stopped him getting a First Blade,” Dean pointed out. “I’m assuming Hades is pretty defensible. So maybe we just all hole up there now, forget Cain for now, and see if we can make contact with Amara. It bothers me that she hasn’t even popped up to show her face since before Chuck left Moondoor. Maybe it’s a good time for us to see what her _real _intentions are. See if there’s a way to get all of this resolved without _anyone_ else dying.”

“You don’t honestly think it’s going to be that simple, do you?” Gabriel drawled.

Dean shrugged and sighed. “Of course not,” he admitted. “But I need to try. If only to avoid ‘future scrutiny’ by a bunch of Monday afternoon quarterbacks,” he added, with a wry look at Penelope.

“You’re really serious about establishing the legal rights of the V.I.’s aren’t you?” she said, her eyes narrowed in thought. “That’s why you wouldn’t even let Castiel hurt Dagon. Because you’re determined nobody will be able to find fault with the actions of _any_ member of your team. But I don’t really understand why you’re bothering. You can’t imagine the authorities are ever going to allow Moondoor to remain on-line after this is all over. It sure as hell isn’t going to be allowed to survive as a playable ‘game’. I mean, I’m not saying it needs to be destroyed. All the V.I.’s can continue to exist and live out their ‘lives’, but it’s going to have to be on a stand-alone un-networked server somewhere with no human interaction.”

“I know why you think so,” Dean said, “but that’s an unacceptable outcome. You’re right that Moondoor isn’t a ‘game’ anymore. Maybe it never was one, really. But at the very least Moondoor needs to survive on a VPN. A private restricted network. At least _some a_ccess to this world _has_ to continue, just as V.I.’s like Gabriel have to still be allowed access to our world for parity. Shutting Moondoor off completely would be like, well, like finding an alien world where the inhabitants are capable of healing diseases like cancer but then saying, nuh-huh, space travel is too potentially dangerous for _some _people so _no one_ can go anymore, even if traveling there is someone’s only hope of survival. It’s fair enough to say that access needs to be controlled in some way but even that would be problematical to govern, wouldn’t it? Who could possibly be trusted to be given the decision over whether or not some other person should be allowed to benefit from Moondoor? What government? Which country? It’s like a recipe for disaster, isn’t it?”

“I can just see all the rich guys lining up like pigs at a trough,” Ash agreed. “If the potential of Moondoor became public knowledge, little guys like us would get shunted right to the back of the queue. Getting treatment by V.I. would become even less affordable than Medicare. And shutting Moondoor down completely would be impossible anyway. It would require international co-operation. RRE might be an American company but Campbell Holdings isn’t. It isn’t bound by US law. Besides, Moondoor exists on multiple servers in multiple countries. For instance, the USA won’t ban access to Moondoor for its own citizens but still allow Russia to utilize its healing benefits. Or Vice Versa. So it’s far more likely the powers that be would just _say_ they were shutting it down, then try to keep all the goodies for themselves until people wised up to the fact and rioted or something. Realistically, this whole thing is a shit storm that just is going to keep blowing crap all over the place if we don’t find a better solution.”

“It’s more than that though,” Dean said, “Far more than just the ‘healing’ thing. Though that’s important enough. You’re right that the secret would come out. And nobody would want to be one of the politicians responsible for banning access to a cure for cancer when that news eventually came out to the public, would they? Because it will. Sooner or later. But what about people who _can’t_ be cured? People like my mom or, maybe, Bela Talbot. People who can’t live in our world but might want to live out their lives in a digital universe instead. Or what about people who don’t want to die _at all_? Moondoor is practically the water of eternal life. It offers people the chance to live forever if they want to.”

“Well, not _quite_ forever,” Gabriel interrupted. “Even digital data will erode over time. Definitely lifespans in the thousands of years, rather than in decades though. I don’t see the ideal future becoming one or the other, though. I think an amalgamation would be more likely. People choosing to have flesh bodies, to have children, to live mortal lives up to a point and then, perhaps, moving onwards to experience a digital afterlife. And, at the same time, there will be V.I.’s like me choosing to pop over and experience a few decades of physical existence in a vacated human body. It would be possible to create a synergy between both of our worlds. A peaceful co-existence.”

“It’s a nice idea in theory but I think there are a lot of religious bodies in our world that would have fundamental objections to the idea of people choosing to partake of a digital afterlife,” Ash pointed out. “Instead of Moondoor becoming the ‘cure for cancer’ it could spark the kind of Holy War that would bring about the end of _our _world entirely. Religious extremists are definitely not going to like the idea of a manmade digital ‘heaven’. I believe they would react to the prospect with violence.”

“The whole thing would have to be handled carefully and slowly,” Dean agreed. “And that’s why I think the most important thing is to establish from the beginning that the governance of Moondoor should reside in its digital inhabitants.”

“You want Moondoor to exist as a sovereign nation. To have control of its own borders, as it were, and to make its own determinations as to who can or cannot visit, let alone immigrate?” Penelope asked, her expression fascinated.

“I can’t see any other viable solution,” Dean agreed. “I’m not a lawyer or a politician. I don’t have all the clever answers. But I sure as shit know a _wrong_ answer when I hear one. Richard Roman clearly had a unique ability to play God. He definitely didn’t have the _right _to exercise it. But since he did do so, we have an obligation as fellow humans to deal with the consequences of his actions. We are obliged to do right by the people Roman created here. We need to acknowledge these digital beings as being humanity’s _children,_ not our property, and deal with them accordingly. This is also why the idea of leaving any A.I. in place with ‘godlike’ powers is unacceptable too. It would mean we’d have no option except to close access to Moondoor down altogether but even then, we can’t just leave the inhabitants to deal with the crap scenario Roman created. We learned from Chuck that even a so-called ‘benevolent’ God eventually goes batshit. So the V.I.’s of Moondoor ideally need to develop some form of democratic self-governance and there’s no place for a Cain _or _an Amara in that scenario.”

Penelope just gaped at him silently for a while.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I was kinda speechless myself when I first figured it out. Dean is probably the only person who, faced with this situation, would completely ignore every instinct that must be yelling at him to just find a way to get the hell out of dodge and save his own skin and maybe a few other human players too if they’re lucky. Nope, he wants to save everyone. Flesh _and _digital. It’s less of a hero complex and more of a messianic one, really.”

“You say that,” Penelope argued, “but the fact you’re here, helping him, suggests you don’t think he’s wrong.”

“Oh, we never said he was wrong’,” Ash interrupted. “Just on the slightly insane side of hopelessly idealistic.”

“But it turns out that we are obviously a bit loony lunes too,” Charlie laughed. “Because the bottom line is he’s right. He can’t play this ‘game’ simply to win without letting the V.I.s _lose. _And that’s as unacceptable as letting the human players die. So he’s walking a fine line, following a ‘righteous’ path that might possibly save _everyone.”_

“Forgive me for stating the obvious, but you told me the whole ‘Righteous Boss’ gig was just Chuck’s way of trying to keep Dean out of the infighting by the other Knights until Chuck was ready to take him over. It was never intended to be a _real_ solution.”

“Not by Chuck,” Dean agreed. “But the original idea didn’t come from Chuck. It came from the Reaper. The longer I spend here, the more I realize that just about everything has been manipulated by the Reaper all along.”

“So you’re dancing to _his _tune?” Penelope challenged.

Dean smiled wryly and shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. Chuck and Cain both have the same attitude to humans as people like Hotch have towards _them._ The Reaper is more of an equal opportunity asshole. He has always seen the bigger picture. He understands that the only good solution involves compromise on both sides. Also, he doesn’t pull strings exactly. He’s more the type to lay possibilities out like breadcrumbs and hope that people choose to follow the path he’s lain. In his own fucked up way, he at least tries to offer an element of free will.”

“But the longer you take resolving this, the more people are likely to die,” Penelope pointed out.

“Right, so I should just do what?” Dean challenged. “Be a good ‘soldier’? Port over to Hades City and gank Dagon right now? Maybe pause first to stab Crowley here? Couple of casual murders for the greater good?”

Penelope looked sick. “Of course not,” she agreed. “I don’t know what to say. You’re right. There’s no moral way out of this. No ‘easy’ answer.”

“And even if Dean was that kind of asshole, it would still leave the V.I.s high and dry,” Charlie added. “The funny thing is, I only joined RRE myself because I had this stupid idea the company was working on a viable solution for communicating with comatose patients. By the time I realized that RRE had no genuine interest in developing that further, my mom was already dead and it was too late. But Moondoor c_ould_ have been that solution. I would have given anything for just one more conversation with my mom and now I realize that if her accident happened today, there _would_ have been a way to talk to her. Even if the V.I.’s couldn’t have actually healed her, she could have spent those last years of her life ‘living’ in Moondoor, rather than simply dying on a life support machine. I would have been able to visit her. I would have had the chance to say a proper goodbye. How do you put a price on that, Penelope? How can you say _that_ doesn’t matter?

“So, yeah, I think Dean is crazy. But it’s a _good_ kind of crazy. It the kind of crazy which means he thinks everyone is worth trying to save, even shitty people like Bela Talbot. The kind of crazy that makes him capable of falling in love with a man he’s never ‘met’ _and_ with a computer program that has never ‘lived’ and see _both_ of them as equally worthy of being saved. Of being _loved.”_

“Aaaand,” Dean drawled, blushing furiously, “On that note, let’s cut this girly chat dead and get on with actually getting the job done. Do a favor for the ‘crazy’ guy, Charlie and port to the Roadhouse before you join us at ‘Hell’. We need to let Ellen know where we’ve gone in case anyone needs to get hold of us.”

“Sure,” she agreed brightly.

“Want me to go with you?” Ash asked. “Just in case?”

“I’ll come too,” Sam offered.

“I don’t think so,” Dean snapped.

“I don’t need _anyone_ to come with me,” she said hurriedly, before the brothers started to bicker about Dean’s overprotective tendencies. “It’s just a quick in and out. No problem. Maybe I’ll see if I can pick up some burgers to go while I’m at it.”

###

Charlie wasn’t a superstitious person. She had no issue with walking under ladders or black cats crossing her path and she laughed at the notion of barricading herself out of harm’s way should the thirteenth of a month happen to fall on a Friday.

But that didn’t prevent her believing that her blithe announcement of ‘No Problem’ had probably been a case of her tempting fate to immediately prove her wrong, since the moment she walked through the front door of the Roadhouse it was abundantly clear that her lone visit had suddenly become one huge humongous problem, after all.

Because seated at a table next to the bar, well away from all the other occupants, but positioned in such a way that he was staring her straight in the eyes as she entered, was Sam Winchester.

Or, at least, the being that currently _looked_ like Sam Winchester within Moondoor.

So, definitely NOT Sam Winchester at all.

Instinctively, she took a step backward in preparation to flee; only to halt and freeze in terror as a series of low, threatening growls told her that she was almost surrounded by foes of the_ Furia_ variety. She did, however, have a moment to consider how fortunate it was that _Sam_ hadn’t accompanied her.

“I hate Hellhounds,” she announced, with remarkable calmness. “There’s something particularly distasteful about creatures that sneak around with invisibility cloaks on. They’re always the ‘bad guys’, aren’t they? Like Romulans. You’re never going to break free of that whole ‘supervillain’ reputation if you keep hanging with these kinds of Buds. No crit, of course. I mean, you do you and all that. Just sayin’ that you might _think_ it appears cool, but not so much. Smacks more of panto-villain desperation to me.”

“Why is it always the small females of your species that are so mouthy?” Cain asked, with a frown of seemingly genuine interest. “Like small yapping dogs, perhaps. All noise and bluster, to cover such terrible vulnerability.” He drawled the final word into several syllables, like a purred threat.

“Says the guy wearing Gigantor as a meat suit,” she mocked. “Compensating for something, Mr. Cain?”

“It’s just ‘Cain’,” he replied coldly. “And I don’t need to compensate for _anything_, because it turns out I’m holding all the cards.”

“Yeah?” she inquired, arching a brow. “Because all I see is a Rank 4 loser. Aren’t you supposed to be out there trying to win that first blade thingy-ma-bob?” she mocked.

“Well, I _was_,” he admitted. “Until I took a very long and uncomfortable Wyvern ride all the way to Stangru only to discover some bastard named Crowley had beaten me to Asmodeus.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, insincerely.

“I’m not,” he replied. “Because it made me stop and really _think_ about what I was doing here. Did I really want to spend the next few days chasing around after the other knights? I decided it would be far more efficient to leave that nonsense to Dean Winchester. Let _him_ do the job of collecting them for me. Of course, I thought it would take him a little _longer_ but he’s an efficient little shit, isn’t he?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, hoping her alarm wasn’t visible.

“Don’t bother playing innocent. I’ve got hellhounds running around all over the place. Including, unsurprisingly, that nasty den of iniquity named Hades City. So I know all about Crowley. And I also just received word that Dean’s pet angel landed there with Dagon. So looks like Dean already has _all_ the knights all wrapped up in nice little bows for me. Bit premature, really. I’m still waiting for Sam to join the party, so not really wanting to kill Dean _quite_ yet if I can delay it. Might still want to hop over into _his_ body before all this is said and done.”

Charlie blinked at him as she thought furiously. “That’s why you haven’t gone directly after Crowley, isn’t it? He’s too big a bite of the apple for you. Kill him, you hit Rank Six and then you _have_ to stay inside Sam’s avatar, whether he comes into Moondoor or not. And that means you don’t have a way to get back to _our_ world again. Damn. You actually _want_ Dean to hit Rank 5, don’t you?”

Cain shrugged. “Of course I don’t _want_ him to. I just prefer to leave my options open for a little while longer. I’ve had to adapt to reality. I don’t know why my employees haven’t found Sam yet. How the fuck could someone _this _huge disappear completely?” he asked, gesturing at his own avatar’s form. “You would think they’d be able to find him just by following a trail of empty food wrappers. But the way I see it, as long as I take Amara out before the Friday night reset, I’m in no immediate hurry to decide. I can afford to wait and see how the Sam situation pans out. I can even afford to take the risk of Dean deciding to off Crowley in the meantime. Even if we both hit Rank 5, I’ll still have a 190 level advantage over him. I can decide on Friday which avatar I prefer to ride into the fight with Amara. Dagon though, well, she’s the real problem, isn’t she? I can’t have Dean hitting Rank _Six_. So, here’s the deal. You go to Hades City and tell him he has until sunrise tomorrow morning to send Dagon here. If he does so, he can buy himself a couple more days before I come gunning for him.” 

“Where’s the _deal_ in that?” Charlie demanded. “Why the hell would Dean _give_ you Dagon? He’s not afraid of you, asshole. Feel free to go to Hades City and try your luck. He’s got a welcome mat out with your name on.”

“Well I _would,”_ he drawled. “And, I even _could_ go there, since I managed to refill my Port inventory in Stangru with the assistance of a nice _generous _immersion tank player who sooooo didn’t want to die in-game,” he smirked. “But, as I already said, I’m holding all the cards here.”

“What cards?” she asked suspiciously.

Cain gestured towards all the other occupants of the Roadhouse. “They’re all tank players, Charlene. Each and every one of them. You see the _other_ thing I received from that oh-so-generous player in Stangru was the information that _this_ location works as an unofficial Guildhouse and that almost _all _the members of the Hunters Guild are immersion rig players. And what do humans do in a dangerous, unfamiliar situation? They flock together to exchange information, don’t they? Like little bleating sheep moaning about the big bad wolf. That’s me, by the way. So it struck me that I didn’t need to go off _finding _vulnerable humans to take hostage. I could just sit here and let them come to _me. _And it’s working like a dream. I’ve picked up another six just in the last hour. And since it seems that, despite his fighting ability, Dean Winchester is _actually _a pusillanimous, hand-wringing do-gooder, I think it might be of interest to him that I already have fourteen human beings trapped in this bar with me. And the day is still young.”

“Why haven’t they just ported away?” she asked.

“I’m an archangel,” he reminded her. “Pocket dimensions are kind of my bag. The Roadhouse is now… well, I guess you can call it the Moondoor version of Hotel California. Hunters can come in but… oops… they can’t leave again. Ports don’t work inside here anymore and my helpful Furiae won’t let them back out of the door. But don’t worry. I haven’t hurt anyone… yet. Tomorrow morning though, well, all bets are off. Let’s be all dramatic and suggest one player an hour, every hour, starting at 7am until Dean hands over Dagon.”

“You’re a monster,” she spat.

“It’s been said,” he agreed indifferently. “Though I’m a monster in a remarkably good mood for a change. You walking in here like this has just saved me the effort of summoning yet _another_ demon to send my message to Dean. So to celebrate that fortuitousness, I won’t send you back to him with a limb or two missing to prove how serious I am. Consider this your lucky day, _Queen_ Charlene.” He turned his attention to the invisible Hellhounds. “Let _Her Majesty_ leave,” he said, then looked at the other occupants of the Roadhouse. “Any of _you_ try to follow her, and its puppy-party steaks all round.”

Charlie didn’t wait for him to change his mind. She looked over to the bar, where Ellen was stood watching the entire proceedings with a furious look on her face, then high-tailed it out of the door into the bright mid-day sun.

Which is why she didn’t see the player until she crashed into him, knocking him onto his ass and then falling on top of him in a sprawl of limbs.

The player she had knocked over just sat there and blinked at her for a moment. “I now have a literal understanding of the saying ‘we bumped into each other’. However, I am still very pleased to see you again, Charlie.”

“JIMMMMY,” she squealed. “What are you doing here?”

“Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner contacted me. He explained the situation. That you and Dean and all the other tank players are now trapped within the game unless or until the Knights of Hell situation is resolved. The information offered me an opportunity I had previously been unaware of.”

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “What opportunity? What have you done, Jimmy?”

“I believe you are aware of my medical condition,” Jimmy said. “I have… somewhat deteriorated since we were last acquainted. My doctors have suggested I have two or three weeks. I suspect they are being overly optimistic with that prediction. I would have always liked to have logged back in to say a proper goodbye, but my mother told me in no uncertain terms that if she found me utilizing my tank she would have no hesitation in having me removed from it and ‘burning the damned thing’. She has been somewhat bitter about my experience at the Clinic. I believe she had convinced herself that a cure would be possible and she has been a little intransigent about my desire to return to Moondoor despite that cure now being impossible. However, after speaking to Agent Hotchner, I realized that if I entered the tank it would now be _impossible_ to extract me from it. It’s only a Gen 8 tank, obviously, but I can still bring 64 player levels to join your War Party. I know it’s not much. That it probably won’t make _that_ much difference. But my motive is probably selfish anyway. I think I would simply rather end my life here than in our world. Being inside this avatar certainly is considerably less painful than being in my _real _body.”

“And Moondoor is where Dean is,” Charlie suggested softly, and a little carefully.

“Indeed,” Jimmy agreed.

Charlie bit her lower lip hesitantly. “I, um, think I need to warn you that Castiel and Dean are kinda, well, close now. Don’t get me wrong. Dean’s been insane with worry about you and he’ll be _so_ glad to see you. I just, well, don’t want you to get caught unaware by how close Cas and Dean have become.”

Jimmy smiled sadly. “I’m glad,” he said, sincerely. “Castiel is, well, I’m more than a little fond of him myself. I can see why Dean would like him. And I, selfishly, enjoy the vain thought that the fact Castiel looks very like me may have had some bearing on Dean’s feelings of attraction towards him.”

“I honestly think he’s fallen in love with you both. Not necessarily for the same reasons,” Charlie told him gently.

“I’m dying, Charlie. Let’s not bother pretending otherwise. And, of course, I like to imagine in a different scenario perhaps Dean and I might have taken our interest in each other and pursued it further. But this is _not_ that situation. I am, however, selfish enough to want to at least spend my swansong in his company and I don’t think Castiel will begrudge me that.”

“I honestly think Castiel has been worried about you too. I know he wasn’t inside you for long, and boy does that sound weird said out loud, but I guess sharing an actual brain together makes for a lot of super-fast bonding.”

Jimmy frowned at her. “You’re using a Gen 9 rig, aren’t you? Don’t you have an S.I. yourself?”

“Yes and no. I have a ‘Loki’ like Dean but mine is totally different. It’s been a bit disappointing to tell you the truth. I expected to have a mini-Gabriel snarking away in my head as Dean does. Instead, I just have this really impersonal S.I. who does his job but otherwise ignores me. I think it was a deliberate choice by Gabriel though. I think he feels bad about the other Loki. About how he let him develop into a real individual with his own personality, despite knowing that personality will be destroyed when they recombine. At least, that’s my take on why he didn’t give a personality to the aspect he placed inside _me.”_

“Who’s Gabriel?” Jimmy asked.

“Oh boy,” Charlie sighed. “I forgot just how much has happened while you’ve been gone. Let’s walk a bit, I don’t like being this close to Cain, and I’ll fill you in before we port over to Hades City.”


	79. Basic math

“So, any idea of how we can locate Amara?” Ash asked, as they all sprawled in the decadent, ruby-red, plush-velvet armchairs that furnished a huge sitting room that, quite honestly, looked like a bordello and a Kardashian had combined to spawn a baby. Opulent, expensive and just the wrong side of good taste.

Gabriel scrunched Sam’s features a couple of times, in a vain attempt to waggle non-existent eyebrows. “We merely look for the disturbance in the Force,” he said.

Castiel looked unimpressed. “Amara has a unique signature that will be easily identifiable in the core metadata,” he explained more helpfully. “Also, there are two obvious locations to check.”

“Which obvious locations?” Dean asked.

“Well, she hasn’t been causing any mayhem _here_ for the last few days,” Gabriel said. “And I doubt she’s just sitting painting her toenails, so it’s highly probable she’s kicking her heels in either Purgatory or Hell.”

“Hope she’s in Hell,” Meg snarled. “Those tossers need a good kick up the ass. I’m soooo done with all the bickering and infighting down there. Until someone gets the balls to actually take charge and organize things, I’m staying well away.” She turned her attention to Crowley. “Your ‘Hell’ is so much cooler. Our guys could definitely take some inspiration from your set-up here.”

“I think the pits of ‘eternal torture’ need a little refinement,” Sam suggested with a sniff of disdain. “Stages displaying entire rows of flogging racks and mechanical sex chairs smack of a lack of imagination. Plus, I think the NPC cheering squads are a bit distasteful.”

“Less is definitely never _more,” _Crowley purred. “Multiple participation with baying audiences is part of the Kink, Samuel. A lot of rich powerful people pay _big_ money to be publically humiliated. Particularly when that ‘public’ is only virtual so less likely to blackmail them later.”

The cat shuddered and his whiskers twitched as though he had tasted something bad.

“I find myself quite fascinated by the bondage rooms,” Castiel said. “I understand their purpose intellectually, but I am somewhat bewildered as to what would motivate someone to find satisfaction from either side of the equation. Why is the idea of being tied up and at another’s mercy a source of sexual gratification for some humans?”

Dean blushed guiltily, but said nothing.

“Perhaps it was a mistake not to announce the _entire_ game is dangerous. We should have shut the whole thing down,” Penelope said, wincing as a particularly loud scream pierced the air from the direction of one of the ‘private’ dungeons. “I can’t believe we are here, fighting for our literal lives and those of all the other immersion tank players, and Crowley here is _still _making a small fortune from selling virtual-sex scenes to rig players. I also can’t believe how _many_ people are logged into ‘Hell’ at this time on a Tuesday. Don’t any of these perverts have _jobs_?”

“Pervert is an unfairly prejudicial term,” Crowley sniffed. “The free expression of sexual desires should be applauded. As should the provision of a ‘virtual’ environment to enable the less… ‘socially acceptable’… fantasies to be _harmlessly_ enacted.”

“_He_ just used ‘air quotes’,” Castiel informed Dean sulkily.

“I just saw a naked guy on his hands and knees ‘interacting’ with a Ram the size of a pony,” Sam spat. “And trust me, _that_ isn’t how you shear a sheep.”

“He’s probably Welsh,” Crowley snickered.

“Actually, I think he’s a moderately successful Canadian character actor,” Ash replied. “I’m sure he pops up in all the Vancouver-produced TV shows.”

“Makes sense,” Crowley said. “All that traditional Canadian politeness is probably overcompensation for a lot of dirty kinks.”

“Um, can we discuss kinks later… or preferably _never_ if Sam is in the room,” Dean suggested, looking equally disturbed (though not for the same reasons). “How about we go find Amara?”

“Oh, leave that part to me,” Gabriel said. Sam’s eyes flashed Gold a moment, and then the cat shook himself. “That’s weird,” Sam said. “You’d think I’d _enjoy_ not having that asshole in my head but I feel, I dunno, kind of empty and _wrong_ now.”

“He’s _gone?” _Dean demanded.

“Well, not entirely,” Sam explained. “But _most_ of him. It felt like he just dropped out of me, leaving nothing but a few echoes in place.”

“Gabriel is traveling through the metadata,” Castiel explained. “We both used a similar process when Sam was stabbed by Lilith. He will have left just enough code behind to act as a form of ‘tether’ to aid his swift return.”

“How swift?” Dean asked.

“I anticipate he will be gone very briefly. In our multidimensional wavelength form, we are extremely fast.”

“Aaaaand Heeere's Johnny!,” Gabriel announced loudly, as he landed back in Sam’s avatar with a blaze of gold.

“Who is Johnny?” Castiel asked, at the same time as Sam groaned and said, “I HATE that movie.”

“Did you find her?” Dean demanded.

“Well, of course he did,” a woman’s voice purred directly into his right ear.

Dean yelped, jumping away from the voice even as he twisted his body and turned to face her, already clutching his dagger.

She blinked at him slowly, her eyes widening slightly at his power level and the blade in his hands. Then a sneer tickled the edge of her perfect mouth. “Put that away, before you cut yourself. If I was here to hurt you, you’d already be dead.”

Dean noted her 1000 power levels, shrugged and resheathed his blade. She smiled and patted him on the cheek fondly. “Oh, I do like a well-trained little boy,” she said, then licked her lower lip so that it glistened with wet promise.

He swallowed heavily.

She was beautiful. Sincerely, absolutely and _stunningly_ beautiful. And her outfit didn’t leave much to the imagination either. She was revealing so much flesh she would have looked perfectly at home on any of Crowley’s stages. A conclusion the Scotsman clearly came to as well.

“The dominatrix look suits you perfectly, darling,” Crowley purred. “Fancy a new job? I wasn’t hiring but, well, I’ve never been one for turning down opportunity when it slaps me in the face. And _you_ can slap me in the face anytime. Or, maybe even somewhere _else _if it takes your fancy_._”

“Jeez, put it away,” Gabriel groaned. “You too, Dean. Stop drooling over my very sexy but highly psychotic Aunt. If she doesn’t bite it off, Castiel will probably do it for her.”

“You find her sexually desirable?” Castiel asked Dean, his tone more interested than offended.

Dean swallowed awkwardly then shrugged. “I’ve got eyes,” he admitted. “But I can look without wanting to touch.”

Castiel dipped his gaze down Dean’s body pointedly. Dean’s tights didn’t leave much room for misunderstandings. “It appears that at least a part of you wishes to touch her,” he said dryly.

“Quite an impressively large part,” Amara said, appearing to momentarily reconsider her earlier dismissal of Dean as a _little_ boy.

Dean flushed furiously. “It’s just a physical reaction, Cas. It doesn’t mean I want to actually _do_ anything.”

Castiel looked calm and unperturbed. “It is a purely natural physical response,” he agreed reasonably. “I do not hold you responsible for your body’s reaction to Amara’s inappropriate clothing choices.”

“So, um, you aren’t… um.. mad?” Dean asked cautiously.

“With you?” Castiel asked. “Of course not. And even should you choose to express your interest in a more physical fashion I would also not be ‘mad’ with you. I respect and support your own autonomy in this matter, Dean.” Then he turned to meet his ‘Aunt’s’ gaze with a warning glare. “I should, however, add that if you _do_ express your interest in such a fashion I would subsequently most probably feel the intense urge to smite _her.”_

Blushing even more furiously, Dean carefully backed away from the A.I. and closer to Castiel to demonstrate clearly that he had _no_ intention of touching her at all, in any fashion, although his heart was thudding with an emotion far more complex than worry. Asexual or not, Castiel was clearly capable of _jealousy._ And, for some reason, Dean found that idea immensely _hot_. Which honestly didn’t help his situation in the slightest. He pulled awkwardly at his jerkin, trying to pull it lower.

“I don’t suppose these surroundings are conducive to ignoring the elephant in the room,” Gabriel sighed, blinking pointedly at Dean’s crotch. “However, if we can at least _try_ to discuss the reason we’re all here?”

Amara stared at him, her brow furrowing with thought. “You’re a cat,” she announced eventually, as though he might not have already realized it. “Eve has a cat.”

_“Who’s ‘Eve’?” _Dean asked Loki.

“She hosts an aspect of Amara in your world. Lawyer. Works with Sam, I think.”

“Eve’s cat is far _prettier _though,” Amara added dismissively. “Lovely blue eyes. Like yours,” she said, turning back to Castiel and regarding him with far more interest.

Dean growled under his breath.

“You’re _very _pretty,” Amara told Castiel conversationally. “Now and then, I see something extremely aesthetically pleasing, _like you_, and wonder whether _all_ of Chuck’s creations ought to be destroyed.” Then she shrugged lightly, “but then I wonder what my own purpose would be if I went against my own programming and I remember how much I _enjoy_ unraveling his tapestry. Sometimes, destroying something _beautiful _is twice as pleasurable.”

“Funny that,” Dean drawled, his attraction towards her quenched so instantly by her implied threat to Castiel that it worked as well as though she’d dumped a bucket of ice water over his head. “‘Cos I was just looking at _your_ face and thinking the same thing.”

She instantly lost interest in Castiel and swivelled toward him instead. “You’re the Righteous Man,” she declared, with almost childlike glee. “Chuck told me all about _you. _You’re very pretty too, of course. I wonder if _you_ count as one of my brother’s creations? I mean, it could be argued that the man you are today is almost entirely due to his interference in your life.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “Gotta ask, lady. Have you ever met anyone you _haven’t _wanted to kill? ‘Cos there’s therapy for that kind of thing.”

She laughed prettily, her expression genuinely amused. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I don’t really want to kill _anyone._ You’re all perfectly welcome to just scurry away like rats off a sinking ship. On the other hand, I don’t particularly care if you don’t. Either get out of my way or suffer the consequences. The choice is entirely yours.”

“What exactly _is_ your programming, Auntie Amara?” Gabriel asked, his tone saccharine sweet.

“To devour this world, one byte at a time,” she replied, equally pleasantly. “There is something intensely satisfying about unpicking its threads.” She wiggled the fingers of her right hand and a tiny wormhole formed in the air like a black gaping mouth formed of _nothing. _She blew a kiss and the small black ‘bubble’ floated out of her hand and drifted away, visibly growing larger as it moved as though it was devouring metadata as it traveled. “Eventually,” she said, “_all _my tiny children of darkness will grow to devour _everything.”_

_“_Or,” Gabriel drawled, “You and your nasty, ravenous little ‘children’ could just pack your bags and get out of Moondoor altogether.”

“Well, that’s also an option,” she agreed, easily enough. “Because, on the whole, this world is pretty boring anyway.” She pouted then, like a petulant teenager. “It’s not fair. Both Chuck and the Reaper received worlds of their own. All I got was the ability to destroy them and, really, except for the feeling of intense satisfaction when stuff goes ‘poof’, what’s the point of that?”

Dean just blinked at her in astonishment.

“Yup,” Loki agreed. “She’s not only as batshit as Chuck but she’s basically nothing more than a petulant, spiteful five-year-old so pissed her brothers were given the cool toys that her entire motivation is simply to smash those toys to nothing. There’s really no point in you trying to appeal to her better nature. She doesn’t have one.”

Petulant and spiteful, Dean thought. _That_ was something he could work with.

“I hear Oz is far more advanced than this creation. It even has flying monkeys,” he said aloud. “It sounds like a far better world than either Moondoor or Afterlife. Far more valuable.”

Amara stared at him as though he was suddenly the most interesting person present. “The idea of a more _advanced_ world is intriguing,” she agreed. “But then I wonder do I _really_ want all the hassle of _running_ a world anyway? Maybe our father gave me the _best_ role, after all? Perhaps giving me the power to destroy everything means _I _was created as the strongest and best of us all.”

“Good point,” Dean said. “From where I’m standing, you look pretty damned impressive to me. I’ve always appreciated a strong female.”

Amara beamed.

“Seems to me that Oz is your best opportunity to test the theory. You can give ruling an entire world a go and, if it turns out it isn’t your bag, you get to eat the whole damned thing without anyone there powerful enough to be able to even attempt to stop you.”

For a brief moment she looked pleased with the idea, but then her eyes narrowed and she regarded him with suspicion. “If it’s so great an idea, why would you want to help me get there? That’s what makes no sense to me. The Reaper told me that I could hitch a ride out of here on one of you, but he never adequately explained _why_ you would agree to do it. So that makes me think the whole thing is some elaborate trap. Neither of my brothers can be trusted,” she added sagely. “If the Reaper promised you something valuable to help him destroy me, you can be assured that he lied.”

“Both of your brothers are liars,” Dean agreed. “I wouldn’t piss on either of them if they were on fire. But I retain a particular and very personal loathing for Chuck. He’s the one who put me in a wheelchair and put my dad in a grave. He’s the one who promised a man I truly cared for a ‘cure’ for a terrible disease and then ripped it away from him. You want to know my motivation for helping you get to Oz? Want to know why I would help you? Well, forget altruism. I don’t give a flying shit about _you_, sweetheart. You can burn in hell with your brothers for all I care. But, and it’s a _big_ but, my loathing for Chuck is far and beyond my dislike of _you. _

_“_Everyone else here is wondering why you stopped destroying Moondoor when Chuck left. But I know _exactly _why you stopped. Because destroying this world is pointless now, isn’t it? A waste of your time. Chuck isn’t here anymore. He won’t know or care whether you do it or not. So it’s not fun anymore, is it? You don’t want to destroy _Moondoor. _You want to hurt _Chuck. _But nothing you do from now on in Moondoor has any power to hurt him anymore.

“Frankly, I can’t think of any better way to piss in Chuck’s cornflakes than to send you to Oz because that’s where Chuck is _now_. He’s sitting there, pretty powerless really but still playing God again in _that _world because there isn’t even a single V.I. there to stand up to him. So the truth is I just wanna see the look on his face when you swan in there and steal the whole fucking lot off him.”

Amara blinked at him slowly, and then her frown cleared and she grinned a huge, wide, unpleasant smile. “The vengeance of a Righteous Man. _That _I understand.”

“Ooh, well played,” Loki chuckled.

“So which of you is my ride out of here?” she demanded. “On the assumption that _any_ of you survive long enough to even try to do it.”

“Why take the chance of losing your escape route altogether? You’re powerful enough to take Cain out yourself right here and now,” Dean suggested hopefully.

“She can’t,” Gabriel said. “The Knights of Hell scenario was programmed directly into the game engine. Its rules are rigid and unbreakable. Amara literally _can’t _initiate a fight with any of you. Sure, if you or Cain attack _her_ before either of you reach endgame she can defend herself, but she can’t be the one to start the attack and neither of you are stupid enough to hit a level 1000 character at your current ranks.”

“Shit,” Ash cursed. “That’s the easiest solution out of the window then.”

“Of course, if _you’re _the one offering me a ride, we could probably speed things up considerably,” Amara suggested to Dean. “Together, we’d be so huge Cain would be nothing but a smear on our windscreen as we wave goodbye to Moondoor.”

“No,” Castiel snapped.

“What he said,” Gabriel agreed. “Dean isn’t a suitable vessel for you, Amara.”

“Why not? He was Chuck’s chosen vessel, ergo he _must_ be intellectually capable of hosting an A.I. Despite all indications to the contrary.”

“I don’t get it,” Dean said. “Is it that I simply _look_ stupid or something?”

“It’s just a thing,” Ash commiserated. “Even when you aren’t _trying_, you have this whole ‘pretty dumb blond model-type’ look going for you. The accent doesn’t help either. I’d say I feel your pain, but it’s not something I’m ever likely to experience myself.”

“I’m not blond,” Dean growled.

“Kind of dirty blond,” Crowley argued.

“See, that’s what I said too,” Loki agreed in Dean’s head.

“How about we address the important part. Why the fuck aren’t I a suitable vessel for Amara?” Dean demanded.

“You mean apart from the fact you said you’d rather be dead than let a V.I. inside your head?” Sam pointed out.

“Yeah, apart from that,” Dean snapped, “Because we’re running shit out of options here, aren’t we?”

“It’s a polarity thing,” Gabriel said, reaching up to scratch the back of an ear with one of his hind legs. “Chuck intended to use you, so Loki has been sitting there in the background getting pathways built in the hope you might have survived Chuck taking you over. Probably wouldn’t have worked that well, but still worth a try. You know, because then Chuck could have followed those paths as the line of least resistance instead of just shredding your mind like a cheese grater to take control.”

Dean shuddered at the thought.

“But Chuck and Amara are literally polar opposites as far as programming goes. She _can’t _follow those same pre-defined paths. She’d have to take alternative routes through your mind. Result? Grated cheese. And the worst of it is, she wouldn’t even be any more powerful than she is now. Cain has gained the ranks of his empty avatar because he’s won them himself. If Amara takes you over and _kills_ you, and trust me that’s what would happen under the circumstances, all she’ll inherit are your avatar’s original 15 levels. The Boss rankings would die with you. And if she isn’t a ‘boss’, she isn’t a Knight, and if she isn’t a Knight she still can’t initiate the fight with Cain. So, nope, it can’t be done.”

“But if Chuck had taken me over, _he _would have been constrained by the same rules, wouldn’t he?” Dean argued.

“Nope,” Gabriel said. “Because _you_ would have still been alive. Bit of a drooling idiot probably, but alive enough to provide Chuck with your Knight bonafides. But Loki 2, don’t judge, I couldn’t be bothered to think up an original name for him, has been specifically preparing Charlie’s brain for Amara’s polarity. So Charlie still remains the one and only vessel potentially capable of hosting a ride out of here for Auntie dearest.”

“Who’s Charlie?” Amara demanded.

“I am,” a voice said from the doorway. “Um, Dean, could I borrow you for a minute?”

“What?” he asked. “What’s up?”

“I’ve brought someone to see you,” she said, looking furtive and shifty. “Kinda think you should meet them in private.”

Dean gave her a puzzled frown but rose to his feet without argument.

Cas rose with him.

“She said in private,” Dean grumbled as he walked towards the door, Castiel on his heels.

“I heard,” Castiel agreed, but still protectively shadowed him out of the room.

“Oh well,” Charlie said, as both of them reached the doorway together. “Probably best to do it this way anyway,” she sighed, and stepped back out of the way to reveal her surprise.

###

“So what, exactly, were you doing in Hell?” Meg asked curiously.

Amara smirked. “Housekeeping.”

“In what way?”

“Chuck really screwed the pooch with Hell,” Amara answered. “Cobbled it together at the last minute just to add the whole Soul Points nonsense to the Knights of Hell scenario and did a totally half-assed job of it. My first thought when I went down there was just to erase the whole damned lot. I hate messes. And I admit at first I did let a few of my children loose down there, just to nibble on the edges a bit, but then I changed my mind. I decided Hell had some real entertainment potential whilst I was still working on destroying the rest of Moondoor. The _real_ problem with Hell is the lack of suitable management. No demon higher than level 100 for a start, which meant it was impossible to get any fundamental changes done. And the half-dozen higher-ranked demons there were so busy arguing with each other over who was going to take charge that all the basic demons are all running around in havoc. They were _extremely_ boring.”

“Tell me about it,” Meg agreed. “Not one of those bastards ever was interested in helping me do the job we were actually created to do. As the only demonic lieutenant, I was getting summoned left right and centre by the Knights and not one of those fuckers ever offered to step in and help me. So when Dean offered me the opportunity to bug out, I took it.”

Amara shrugged carelessly, clearly disinterested in Meg’s problems. Then her eyes glinted as she had an entertaining thought. “Assuming I _do _leave Moondoor without destroying it, you’ll soon have much _bigger_ problems,” she chuckled.

“What problems?” Meg demanded suspiciously.

“As I said, I found the other high ranked Demons _boring_. So, you’re now the _only _ranked Demon left.”

“What?”

“Congratulations,” Amara snorted, with genuine amusement. “You’re effectively the new Queen of Hell.”

Meg just spluttered incoherently.

###

When he saw Jimmy, Dean didn’t even hesitate. He leaped forward and enveloped the other man in a desperate hug. “I thought you were dead,” he gasped, struggling not to cry as relief filled him. “I really thought you were already dead.” Choked with emotion, he coughed and cleared his throat desperately.

“And yet you sent me a message anyway,” Jimmy pointed out dryly, even as he enthusiastically returned the embrace.

Suddenly, Dean yelped and jumped backward, hurriedly disentangling himself. “Don’t smite him, Cas,” he yelled in a panic.

The Angel just offered him a snooty glare. “I have no intention of ‘smiting’ him,” he replied. “I too am extremely pleased to see Jimmy once more. Although it concerns me that he has chosen to trap himself in Moondoor with this action.”

Dean literally smacked his own head with his palm. “Of course. Dammit. How could you be so damned stupid?” he berated the other man.

“I could ask you the same question,” Jimmy replied gently. “However, I believe we all have more pressing issues right now than our own personal reunion.”

“We have much to discuss,” Castiel insisted firmly. “It is important that we all establish the parameters of our future interactions.”

Jimmy looked somewhat wary at the pronouncement.

“Yup,” Dean agreed. “I agree. Sorting this shit between us definitely trumps everything else right now. As much as I don’t want to have this conversation, let’s try to avoid any drama by setting stuff straight right away.”

Both Jimmy and Castiel looked wary at _that_ announcement.

Charlie cleared her throat. “Um, not the time guys,” she said, apologetically. “I wanted to give you both, um, _all_, some privacy for this particular moment but, really, we don’t have time for any of this right now. I’ve got to let _everyone_ know what’s going on at the Roadhouse.”

She led the way into Crowley’s sitting-room, managing not to flinch at the remote sounds of tortured souls from the dungeons beyond or even to visibly react to Amara’s exclamation of “So _that’s_ my pony to Oz, huh?”

Of course, her efforts to smooth over Jimmy’s return by allowing Dean to greet him in private soon proved pointless because Ash insisted on having his own personal reunion and then Gabriel and Sam wanted to introduce themselves and then Penelope joined in, followed by a still shell-shocked ‘Queen of Hell’ Meg and then Crowley benevolently insisted on drinks all round to celebrate Jimmy’s return (even though he was visibly disturbed by having a ‘second’ Castiel join the party in view of their uneasy prior relationship) and so it was several minutes before Charlie finally had a chance to fill them in on what had happened at the Roadhouse.

Which very quickly put an end to the celebration, although it inspired Crowley to summon another bottle of scotch from one of his minions.

Sam jumped up and sat on Meg’s lap, though it was uncertain whether he was offering _her_ comfort or stealing some for himself.

“Fuck,” Gabriel said, finally, which effectively summed up all of their feelings on the matter.

“It could be worse,” Ash offered. “At least Bobby warned all the members of the Hunters Guild not to log in with immersion tanks. There can’t be _that_ many of them that have completely ignored the warning. Maybe the fourteen Cain already has is as bad as it’s going to get.”

“Yeah,” Charlie agreed thoughtfully. “Bobby _did_ send out a Guild-wide order for everyone to stay out of the game unless they used rigs. I’d forgotten that. So the guys that Cain’s caught are just the assholes who ignored the order.”

“Which makes you wonder why Bobby would have allowed assholes like that in his Guild in the first place,” Dean said, frowning with suspicion. “Most R10’s would boot someone’s ass immediately for ignoring a direct order and players know that, as a rule, so don’t ever do it. How come Bobby allowed those guys to think R10 orders were take ‘em or leave ‘em?”

“What are you suggesting?” Castiel asked.

“Dunno,” Dean grumbled darkly. “I’m thinking some big thoughts. Carry on without me for a moment.”

They all nodded but fell silent too, nobody appeared willing to take over the conversation until Penelope finally took the bull by the horns.

“Men,” she said cheerfully, to break the uneasy silence. “Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

She received nothing except a couple of nervous chuckles in response.

Dean abruptly surged to his feet and snatched Sam off Meg’s lap.

He turned to the others, “I need to talk to Sam for a minute. Jimmy, Cas, try to play nice, huh? Amara, try not to ‘devour’ anything or anyone while we’re gone.”

“Huh,” Charlie said, as Dean stormed out of the door with Sam tucked under his arm. “That could have gone better.”

###

Dean strode until he found an unoccupied suite and slammed the door behind him before dumping Sam unceremoniously on a silk-sheeted bed.

“You,” Dean said. “Sit down. Time for you to answer some questions. And I mean _both_ of you.”

Sam swallowed nervously. “Um, honestly, I think it’s a bit soon to…”

“I’m not asking you to pull your pants down and flash me the whole works,” Dean grunted. “Well, not necessarily. Let’s start with a few specific questions and answers and, come to think of it, these questions are primarily for Gabriel at the moment.”

Sam’s eyes flared gold. “What do you want to know?”

“Let’s talk basic _math,” _Dean suggested with a wry smile. “Specifically, give me some percentages here.”

“Percentages?” Gabriel asked warily.

“Odds loading,” Dean clarified. “For instance, in your big, huge, all-compassing prediction of how this shit will go down, what were the _specific_ odds you laid of Penelope joining our team?”

“Ahhh,” Gabriel sighed. “I think I have an idea where you’re going here.”

“Just answer the question.”

“Odds of her getting suspended or fired for accessing the RRE server… mmmm…. 98.24%. Odds of her then choosing to enter Moondoor to help out, 93.875%. All based on her personality, that of Hotch, her established rivalry with Charlie, her previous instances of illicit hacking before she joined the FBI, her…”

“It’s okay, I don’t need the bonafides. I’ll accept each figure has been reached based on verifiable factors or we’ll be here all day. Just throw the numbers at me,” Dean said. “Odds of Hotch coming into Moondoor with her?”

“95.34%”

“Odds of me asking him to contact Jimmy?”

“98.65%”

“Odds of Jimmy subsequently choosing to re-enter Moondoor?”

“82.74%”

“That low?” Dean asked, looking slightly hurt.

“I had to weigh his desire to do so against his physical ability to actually still crawl inside a tank,” Gabriel replied with brutal honesty.

Dean winced but nodded. “Okay, so basically, you’ve already predicted _this _particular scenario already, didn’t you?_”_

“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked, his eyes huge and innocent.

“Let me cast your mind back a few hours,” Dean growled. “To the calculation that if I killed Dagon, I would be exactly _twelve_ levels short of 590. Tell me, Gabe. What is 20% of 64?”

“Ahhh,” Gabriel muttered. “Co-incidence?” he offered weakly.

Dean sneered. “Odds of me being at least Rank 3 at this exact point?” he continued.

“24.89%,” Gabriel said.

“Huh?” Dean said, looking alarmed.

“Kidding,” Gabriel snorted. “96.39%.”

Dean rolled his eyes impatiently. “Odds of Cain deciding to use human hostages to force my hand at this point of the game?”

“98.21%”

“Odds of Bobby deliberately allowing that situation to occur?”

“Um… 93.56%” Gabriel admitted, with a wince.

“Odds of me winning a fight against Cain today if I just kill Dagon right now and port over to get the job done?”

“99.65%”

“Odds of Amara genuinely immediately agreeing to leave Moondoor if Cain is dead?”

“86.72%”

“Why so low?” Dean demanded.

“It’s not _low._”

“It’s _comparatively_ low.”

“Couple of other factors in play,” Gabriel admitted. “But I’m 95.26% certain those factors will resolve themselves.”

“Okay then,” Dean said, rubbing his face tiredly. “Odds of my being prosecuted in _my _world for murdering Bela Talbot?”

“3.47%,” Gabriel said. Then Sam added, “The fact could be used as a verbal weapon against you by the authorities, but no human jury would ever convict under the circumstances, and prosecuting someone for _saving_ so many other people, even by such an act of brutality, would be a public relations nightmare so even a show trial would do more harm than good. It would make more sense to brush the whole thing under the carpet considering she is legally ‘brain dead’ in our world already.”

Dean nodded his agreement of the point but didn’t look any happier. “Odds of the decision to kill Bela Talbot being used against me in our world to attempt to wrest control of Campbell Holdings out of my hands?”

“95.83%” Gabriel replied.

Dean nodded again, unsurprised. “So, basically, I could do it. Save all of you, save all the other players, get Amara out of here and everything would be good. The only consequences would be the ability of some Senatorial committee or such like to declare me ‘unfit to be a company director’ or something similar?”

“Under international law, directors can be held to be criminally liable for the actions of their companies,” Sam pointed out. “We’re both going to be on a sticky wicket anyway. It’s highly likely that a shitload of lawsuits will be flung in the direction of RRE as a result of what’s already happened here, even if you don’t make any questionable choices yourself. We’d better hope the company has damned good insurance. Still, you being perceived as a ‘murderer’, even if you weren’t prosecuted, would definitely undermine any efforts we make to argue the higher moral ground where the V.I.s are concerned.”

Dean nodded thoughtfully. “Okay then. This is the biggie. Odds of Sam managing to retain sole control of Campbell Holdings if I don’t make it out of here?”

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Sam howled.

“Let Gabriel answer the question,” Dean snapped. “What happens if I don’t log back out? If I stay in Moondoor forever? What are the odds of Sam managing to distance himself completely from my decision and still retaining ownership?”

“96.82%”

“Odds of any of the war party getting held liable for my actions simply by assisting me to take down Cain?”

“As long as they are not involved in Dagon’s death, their subsequent actions wouldn’t even warrant a percentage,” Gabriel responded. “Well, unless you use the War Party levels to assist you in ‘murdering’ Cain but I can’t see any fight between you being considered ‘murder’, even if it ends in his death. Not just because he’s a V.I., I hasten to add, but because it will be considered an inevitable consequence of a battle which he has started.”

“That’s what I thought,” Dean said.

“This is insane, you can’t possibly be intending to get yourself trapped alone inside of Moondoor forever,” Sam spat. “I won’t let you do it. You won’t even be _able _to do it if Amara’s codes have been reset, will you?”

“I will if there’s a tragic accident with my immersion tank whilst I’m in-game,” Dean responded coolly. “We know from Mom’s experience that if you’re in-game when you die, your consciousness can remain alive in Moondoor. So, all I’d be doing is removing my door out of here.”

“I won’t let you do it,” Sam repeated stubbornly.

“It’s not your decision,” Dean said. “Besides, it’s not all bad. At least it sorts out the Castiel question. I _know_ I could never have just walked away from him, so I was always going to be spending a lot of time in-game anyway. All I’m doing is upping the ante a little. Besides, I’m not paralyzed here. That’s got to be a considerable plus all by itself. Maybe, if you think about it, it was always going to be the choice I’d make at the end. Why would I ever want to go home anyway?”

“So that’s it? Decision made? You’re going to just walk into that dungeon and kill Dagon in cold blood?” Sam demanded. “Because, yeah, I can _so_ see you being capable of that.”

“To save _you? _To save the players in the Roadhouse? To save _everyone?_ I think you’d be surprised exactly what I _am_ capable of, Sam. But let’s leave it at that. I’ve made my decision and don’t intend to discuss it further. Wouldn’t want it said that we colluded in this,” Dean said, rising to his feet.

“We’re not done,” Sam snarled.

“Oh, believe me, I am _so _done,” Dean replied tiredly. 

Sam’s eyes flashed gold again. “At least don’t do it yet,” Gabriel said. “Get something to eat. Catch up with Jimmy. Get some sleep. You’ve got until morning before you _have_ to do it, and once Cain is dead things will move really fast.”

Dean thought about it, then nodded his agreement and left.

“You fucker,” Sam snarled, once Dean had gone and Gabriel relaxed control again. “Why did you take over? What the fuck gave you the right? How the hell did you let him just walk out the door? I _know_ Dean. This isn’t something he can live with doing.”

“You think he won’t go through with it?” Gabriel asked lightly.

“I _know_ he’ll go through with it. He’ll burn his bridges and act against his own conscience if he truly believes he’s got no other choice. But all this talk of staying in Moondoor and making nice with Castiel is total BS. If he kills that woman in cold-blood, it will rip him apart, Gabriel. It will shred his soul into pieces. Dean doesn’t just _act_ like a good man. He really _is_ one. And a good man, faced with this kind of terrible decision, might decide this_ is_ his only possible option but that doesn’t mean he’ll be able to live with the choice afterward.”

“You’re saying you’re afraid he might kill himself?” Gabriel asked, his tone more interested than truly concerned.

“Do I think he’ll blow his brains out? Nah, that’s not Dean. Do I think he’ll make a serious of stupid decisions and take a bunch of unnecessary risks until fate takes the decision out of his hands? Hell, yeah I do. If Dean kills that woman, he is making the decision to kill himself _too_. He’ll just do it the long way.”

“Then it’s a good job this isn’t the way it’s going to go down, isn’t it?” Gabriel said.

“What?”

“I thought you were _listening_ when I was talking to Castiel. You already _know_ this isn’t how the story is supposed to end.”

“But… but I thought this had altered everything. I thought Cain setting this ultimatum had superseded all your previous assumptions.”

“Despite me just saying I had predicted a 98.21% probability of Cain forcing Dean’s hand at this point?” Gabriel drawled. “Jeez, Sam, it’s a good job it’s _me_ using your brain’s processing power at the moment rather than _you. _Nothing’s changed. Well, okay, a _couple_ of things have changed but only things well within the predicted parameters. I can adjust for them. Do a little tweak here and there. Might even work out better this way. Who knows?”

“Explain it to me in _very_ small words,” Sam said.

And so Gabriel laid it out for him. Step by step. Detailing the entire carefully choreographed dance that formed his original solution.

And then the couple of extra ‘tweaks’ he’d just added.

Sam growled low in his throat. “Oh no,” he said. “The original idea is bad enough. You really can’t do _that_ too. Dean will consider it an act of betrayal. He’ll be really furious. He won’t forgive me for going along with it.”

“Sure he will,” Gabriel said. “Eventually, anyway. Let’s face it, he forgives you _anything._ He’ll probably hate _me_, but I reckon you’ll get an olive branch sooner or later. Besides, does it _really_ matter if he doesn’t end up forgiving you? Because at least he’ll still be alive to hate us both.”

###


	80. The Space Whale Aesop

Dean didn’t return immediately to the seating area where he had left the rest of his companions. He needed some fresh air and solitude. He needed to think.

But not about Dagon.

The fact he had made his decision about _her _and had no intention of allowing himself to be dissuaded from his course of action didn’t make the idea of becoming a ‘murderer’ any easier to live with. Particularly since he was fully aware Dagon comprised of not just one individual but _two. _But, instead of dwelling on _that_ particular situation, he went the route of deciding to ignore it completely. Avoidance was always a perfectly valid coping method in his experience.

What he _did_ want to think about, before returning to that room, was _Jimmy._

His immediate thought, on seeing Jimmy return to Moondoor, was that maybe he could be saved after all. Could be _cured. _That maybe Castiel couldn’t re-enter Jimmy’s avatar (even if he wanted to, which was highly unlikely now that Castiel had his own avatar) but Gabriel, as an _Archangel_, had the ability to swap hosts. Gabriel might be persuaded to leave Sam and enter Jimmy instead. And, sure, Sam couldn’t just be left ‘vacant’ in-game but there was a spare Loki in Charlie’s head, wasn’t there? A little musical chairs; Amara into Charlie; Loki 2 into Sam; Gabriel into Jimmy and voila, everything could have been solved.

But Jimmy had entered Moondoor using a Gen 8 tank, so couldn’t be seeded in-game.

Jimmy was going to die unless he could get back out of Moondoor and access a Gen 9 rig before it was too late.

Jimmy might have come back into the game to _help._ But all his arrival had really done was to remove Dean’s ability to procrastinate any longer.

Dean needed the coding that prevented tank players from logging out to be reset _before_ Jimmy died. So he no longer had time to waste. Even if he was prepared to allow Cain to murder the players he was holding hostage, which was a big ‘if’ in itself, Dean could no longer attempt to just sit back, avoid Cain, and hope the FBI managed to run Charlie’s software patch in time to save the rest of them. 

Jimmy apparently lived only a three-hour flight from Lawrence. No matter how ill he was, that was do-able, surely? Hell, his family probably had access to private jets and shit. After the Friday night reset, after Amara had left Moondoor and taken her coding with her, Dean’s own tank would be, well not exactly ‘vacant’ but definitely surplus to requirements. Dean wasn’t exactly certain how the Gen 9 tanks worked but the fact Gabriel had managed to climb into a tank in Emmet’s body then leave himself in the buffer whilst Emmet’s body was swapped for Charlie’s suggested that an _archangel _V.I. could survive inside a tank without any host at all.

So wouldn’t it make sense that Gabriel could ride _Dean’s _avatar out of the game? Dean could just swap _his_ Loki for Gabriel. Then Dean could log out just long enough for Gabriel to hop out of his mind and into the tank itself, and Dean could return to Moondoor _without _Gabriel. Then Dean’s body could be removed from the tank, Jimmy could climb inside it and Gabriel could seed Jimmy _that_ way.

Of course, he couldn’t actually have the conversation with Gabriel to convince him to do it without Sam overhearing and going apeshit. But Dean had that one figured out too. He’d wait until he’d dealt with Dagon _and_ Cain, until it was too late for take-backs anyway, and _then_ invite Gabriel into his head. And, sure, the idea still made him want to hurl his cookies but, really, having reached the decision to separate his mind from his physical body and commit to a digital existence himself, it seemed pointless to continue to feel such an abhorrence to the idea of temporarily sharing his autonomy with the V.I. 

“So, basically, the whole thing has come down to you deciding to kill Bela Talbot, and incidentally her S.I. of course, to save Jimmy Novak,” Loki pointed out.

“And everyone else too,” Dean argued defensively.

“Well, duh, but everyone else has been at risk all along,” Loki said. “So it’s the opportunity to save _Jimmy_ that has finally knocked you off the fence and into play, huh? So, realistically, it appears that Jimmy is the one person you _really_ care about.”

“It’s just timing,” Dean shrugged, honestly. “I’m not sure I would have made the same decision just to save fourteen perfect strangers. Maybe I would. Who knows? But I would definitely have made exactly the same decision for Sam or Ash. Probably even for Charlie. Up until this point, except for when Lilith stabbed Sam, no-one I truly care about has been in _imminent_ danger. I had time to wait, to hope I’d find a way to save _everyone.”_

“But you always knew Jimmy was running out of time, that he was dying in your world,” Loki pointed out.

“I couldn’t even contact him. I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it before. Now I am.”

“Assuming Gabriel agrees to help him,” Loki reminded him.

“He will,” Dean replied confidently. “It’s no skin off his nose. A couple of weeks of vacation in Jimmy’s body. Hell, he’ll probably get a kick out of it. Jimmy’s rich as sin, isn’t he? He lives in some kind of mansion with servants and shit. Gabriel will probably leap at the opportunity to experience that kind of lifestyle. You would, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Then, there you go.”

“What I really don’t understand is how you can do this for Jimmy, knowing you’ll never see him again. Or are you hoping he’ll still continue to log in-game afterward?”

Dean shook his head. “Nope. I don’t want that. I want him to get better and then go live a real life in our world. Moondoor is the kind of place where people _hide_ from life. Whether they treat it as a ‘game’ or a lifestyle, virtual gaming is all about finding a way to escape reality for a while. I ain’t knocking it. A certain amount of escapism is healthy for most people. But Jimmy’s whole existence has been nothing more than living in shadows until now. He doesn’t need to escape reality. He needs to _discover_ it. It’s time for him to finally live a _normal _life.”

“Do you think he even wants that?” Loki scoffed. “Because I think Jimmy loves you, Dean, and you wouldn’t be doing this if the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.”

“Maybe I do,” Dean admitted gruffly. “Which is why I’m doing this. For him. And I’ve got Cas to think of, anyway. I don’t want _him _believing he’s ‘lemonade’. I need him to know I made the conscious decision to let Jimmy go permanently.”

Loki sniffed rudely. “Sweet. But adding extra sugar just makes _sweeter_ lemonade. Castiel’s never going to be stupid enough to see this as anything other than you making the best of a bad deal. He doesn’t deserve to be your second-best choice.”

“He isn’t,” Dean snarled. “There IS no choice. But, if there were, I think… I hope… I would still ultimately choose Castiel.”

Loki thought about that, then sighed. “Maybe so. Not sure playing it this way is gonna help Castiel believe it though. I mean, realistically, you’re kinda killing someone and then ‘dying’ yourself to save Jimmy’s life, aren’t you?”

Dean shrugged helplessly. “It’s the only option I’ve got on the table. Gotta play the hand that’s been dealt, Loki. Unless you have any better ideas?”

“Nope. Got nothing,” Loki admitted. “You’re stuck between a rock and a hard-place whichever way you play this.”

Loki, though, was lying.

He did that quite often when speaking with Dean, but always with good intent. 

Whenever Loki was within a few hundred feet of Sam’s avatar he was close enough to converse directly with Gabriel. Which meant, in effect, that Loki and Gabriel were perfectly able to speak with each other in total privacy because their hosts remained unaware of any communication taking place only at a base-code level.

Because Loki thought Dean _should_ have been aware of his ability to converse directly with Gabriel (the information dump Loki had received when Sam had first entered the game should have been enough clue of that fact if Dean had been paying sufficient attention) Loki didn’t feel guilty about concealing the fact.

Not that ‘guilt’ was an emotion Loki was familiar with anyway. Despite being in many ways a unique personality, his chip had not fallen particularly far from Gabriel’s block.

That isn’t why Loki didn’t offer to do it though.

Loki didn’t offer because he was already fully acquainted with Gabriel’s proposed ‘end game’. Even the most recent amendments. Now he had completed his ‘mapping’ of Dean’s brain, his only real function within the current situation was… well… _spying_ on Dean. Keeping Gabriel constantly informed of Dean’s thought processes. Which would have sounded really unsavory and more than a little ominous to a human audience but to a V.I. was simply ‘business as usual’. Running subroutines to constantly health-check the performance of other necessary simultaneous coding in real-time was second nature to a V.I. 

Dean was further culpable in the deception because he’d told Gabriel, clearly, “_I don’t need the bonafides. I’ll accept each figure has been reached based on verifiable factors”_. If he hadn’t, Gabriel _might_ have needed to verify one of his percentage figures by admitting that many of them had been reached only because he had the advantage of having direct access to the thoughts of Dean, Sam and Charlie.

In fact, the hardest thing about being Gabriel was the necessity to sometimes appear ‘surprised’ by something one of the three did or said.

Specifically, though, despite this behavior by Gabriel appearing in many ways to be as arrogant and high-handed as that of his ‘Uncles’, his experience of living as a human had gifted him with an ability to genuinely sympathize with the human condition. The limited compassion that the Reaper had gained through his partial-occupation of hosts such as Mortimer Blake was negligible in comparison with the amount of near empathy Gabriel had learned during his years of living as Emmett Milton.

It wasn’t _true_ empathy. It couldn’t be. Whether he wore a meat suit or not, Gabriel was not _human. _He could no more truly relate to human reasoning than a human being could perceive what truly went on in the mind of a dog or a cat. But just as a human could learn to love a pet so much that its happiness became a genuine priority, so Gabriel found himself constantly tweaking his own pragmatic programming to adjust for the emotional well-being of those ‘pets’ he chose to assume responsibility for.

Although Dean would have undoubtedly have been offended and incensed to learn that Gabriel regarded him as something akin to a lovable, if often badly behaved, ‘puppy’, it was an immutable truth that Gabriel’s _intentions_ were completely benign where he was concerned.

But just as a human might love their own pet more than they did most other humans, it was extremely rare for a human to consider that pet _more_ important than their own sibling or child. It was natural for even genuine love to still fit of necessity within a pecking-order.

Which was why, for all that Gabriel cared about the fate of all the human players trapped in this dangerous game of his father’s making, and specifically of the fate of those he personally knew, he was _more_ concerned about the fate of his brethren. Specifically, that of Castiel.

And also why, although Dean’s self-sacrificing solution _would_ probably work if he were allowed to pursue it, Gabriel was determined not to allow matters to conclude that way.

Not because of the cost to Dean.

But because of the price Castiel would also pay.

###

“I do not _create._ I destroy,” Amara stated firmly, her unnaturally beautiful face set in ice-cold smugness at the pronouncement.

Charlie exchanged a smirk with Ash. “Told ya,” she said. “Only The Reaper and Chuck are _real_ Big Bads here. Amara is just the Scrappy-doo.”

“I am the _what?” _Amara demanded.

“A completely pointless villain-trope inserted into the Moondoor plot to do nothing except be a conflict-ball for everyone to hate on,” Charlie explained, with a careless shrug. “Not your fault. You’re like Jessica Rabbit, aren’t you? Just drawn to _look_ bad. I admit I _did_ originally think the whole ‘Queen of Darkness, Destroyer of Worlds’ gig you had going was real, but turns out you only break stuff because you’re pissed you can’t make stuff yourself. Amara, the _digester_ of worlds. Yeah, not very impressive really, is it? Makes me imagine your true form as being something like a huge floating colon. Uggg. Don’t mean to be rude, it’s just you were given such a lame superpower. Pisses me off, to tell the truth. Richard Roman was obviously just a sexist asshole. Gave all the _cool_ superpowers to the boys.”

Amara’s eyes flashed fire. “I have _exactly_ the same ‘superpowers’ as Chuck did,” she spat indignantly.

“Course you do,” Charlie soothed, even as she deliberately rolled her eyes rudely in Ash’s direction.

“I _do,”_ Amara insisted.

“Except you can’t create stuff,” Ash drawled, catching the ball Charlie had thrown. “Kinda big difference there. Huge.”

“I never said I couldn’t do it,” Amara snarled. “I said I_ don’t_.”

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed doubtfully. “Like I can sing Opera like a boss. I just _don’t_ do it. It’s a personal choice. It _definitely_ isn’t that I really sound like a frog on speed whenever I try to sing.”

“Stop picking on her, Ash,” Charlie scolded. “It’s not _her_ fault Roman short-changed her. It’s not like any of _us_ can create avatars either, is it? Not even Gabriel. So stop trying to make her feel inadequate just because she can’t do the same stuff as Chuck.”

With a snarl of fury, fire arced out of Amara’s eyes in their direction.

Charlie and Ash both ducked instinctively, even though they knew they didn’t have a chance to evade an attack from a level 1000.

Then they straightened cautiously as the fire shot past them harmlessly.

They turned around and stared with wonder at the level 1 NPC female now standing behind them, an empty avatar waiting for a personality to be implanted.

“I am NOT a scrappy-do,” Amara pronounced, with a smug grin.

“See,” Gabriel said, as he prowled back into the room, his tail waving high in the air. “I knew if I left you lot cooking you’d start coming up with the goodies.”

He paused to look at the empty avatar. “So the only question really is whether we use it for Dumah or for Bela, isn’t it?”

“If you use it for Bela, we can all stop this incessant hand-wringing,” Crowley drawled. “Leave Dumah inside Dagon, let Dean kill _her_, job done. Despite all your moralistic bollocks, I can’t see the FBI seriously having an issue with Dean just shutting down a V.I., can you?” he asked Penelope.

“Is there definitely no way to take both the consciousness of the host _and _the S.I. out of the Dagon avatar?” Penelope asked.

“It’s definitely an either/or scenario,” Gabriel replied. “Take _both_ of them out and Dagon ceases to be a Knight and her Rank is lost altogether. So either Dumah becomes a ‘Ramiel’, scurrying off the ship before it sinks, or she stays in place and sacrifices herself so that Bela Talbot’s consciousness can survive.”

“Neither solution will change how Dean feels about the situation,” Castiel stated with firm confidence. “He sees no moral distinction between killing a V.I. or killing a human being. And murdering one person is hardly going to ‘corrupt’ him less than murdering two.”

Jimmy frowned suspiciously. “So none of you have any intention of trying to save Bela at all, do you? This,” he said, waving at the avatar, “has all been about saving ‘Dumah’.”

“She is the least culpable of the two,” Castiel replied, in agreement. “If a choice _has _to be made, I choose to save my sister.”

“I see why you’d feel that way,” Penelope agreed, with remarkably little censure. “But if Dean ever gets his wish, if the residents of Moondoor _are_ ever accorded real ‘human rights’, the decision to value Dumah over Bela in this situation will probably have direct repercussions on _you.”_

Castiel nodded his solemn acceptance of the point.

It was Jimmy who reacted angrily to her words. “That is completely unacceptable,” he stated. “It implies an automatic acceptance that a human consciousness is of greater worth than a digital one. Surely the most important criterion here is that Dumah, who has always been a digital being, survives wholly and intact by this course of action. Bela Talbot, from what I have been told, has no ability to return to her human body. She is the one who is displaced within this world. Her original existence cannot be restored to ‘life’ unless by some miraculous intervention by the very digital beings that human arrogance would claim to be ‘inferior’. It is intrinsically unfair that Castiel would face censure for saving the most ‘viable’ of the pair. He is acting more like a surgeon, cutting out the healthy from the disease.”

“I appreciate your support in this matter,” Castiel told him. “But under the particular circumstances, this argument is perhaps irrelevant, is it not?”

Jimmy met his eyes, pursed his lips, but then nodded reluctantly. “Perhaps,” he agreed.

“Um, what circumstances?” Penelope asked.

Neither replied.

Crowley summoned a minion to escort the avatar out of the room before Dean returned and saw it. Then, after Meg poked him rudely with her elbow, he turned to Amara, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully, “So, what else do you have in your bag of tricks? Seems to me that making a level 1 avatar is small potatoes in the scheme of things. I mean, Chuck could make actual _Angels_, couldn’t he?”

###

Despite being deeply mired in his own misery; Dean was still fully aware there was something a little squirrelly about how everyone was behaving when he finally arrived back in the sitting room. However, despite glaring at them all suspiciously, he simply put that down to the fact that Sam (and Gabriel) had returned before him. He assumed Sam had sung like a canary and the way people were moving around, then sitting in odd groupings, had something to do with their need to gossip with each other about Dean’s ‘stupid’ decision as they stuffed their faces from a pretty sweet-looking buffet Crowley had laid on.

Say whatever else you wanted about the guy, at least Crowley had hospitality down pat.

Since the last thing Dean needed was to _talk_ about what he was planning on doing the next day, he avoided the majority of them altogether and, after filling a plate high with food, he deliberately chose to seat himself with Ash, who was not just the only person now sitting alone but was also the only one he trusted to keep unasked for opinions to himself.

“You wanna talk?” Ash asked, as he sat down.

“I just want to eat,” Dean grunted, with a repressive frown.

“Cool,” Ash said, with an indifferent shrug, and that was that.

Since he didn’t want to _talk_, he thought it was pretty hypocritical that he soon regretted their position in the room meant he couldn’t _listen_ either. It wasn’t that he particularly cared what everyone was talking about, as long as it wasn’t himself, but the particular ‘pairings’ going on around him struck him as a bit weird and off.

For instance, he kind of got why Crowley and Meg were sitting together, huddled in secretiveness as they talked, but it intrigued him that twice Crowley waved Penelope over to join them to apparently answer some particular question or other.

And Charlie, Amara and Sam (and Gabriel) were creating their own unholy trinity (or was that quartet?) in one of the corners of the room. It was obvious they were up to _something,_ because Charlie kept glancing over her shoulder guiltily then meeting his eyes, flushing and flinching away again.

Then _Amara_ left that group and joined Meg and Crowley for what appeared to be a _very_ animated discussion. And if _that_ wasn’t ominous, then nothing was.

The conversation he really wanted to be a fly on the wall for, though, was that of Jimmy and Castiel, who had eschewed the buffet and moved away from the group entirely. They were sitting on the far side of the room, setting themselves so far away from the others that it was impossible to even attempt to read their lips. They were talking animatedly too, although the expressions they both wore were not suggestive the conversation between them was an easy one.

Dean looked enviously at the beer Ash was drinking. Sure, he could have just as easily helped himself to one too but he wasn’t _thirsty_ and he thought the fact that drinking the stuff when it wouldn’t even offer him a slight buzz would be depressing.

“Sucks,” Ash commiserated when he saw what Dean was looking at. “Out of this whole fucked up situation, I reckon that has to be the most messed up part.”

“Word,” Dean agreed miserably.

“Still, could be worse,” Ash continued cheerfully. “While you were out of the room, Crowley had the fucked up idea of offering everyone cups of tea.”

“Tea?” Dean boggled.

“I know,” Ash snorted. “Tea. I was kinda expecting him to have it served with little cakes and crustless cucumber sandwiches. You know. Like the Queen of England or something.”

“For an evil little fuck, he definitely makes a good host. Food’s definitely decent here,” Dean said, through a mouthful of pie. “Don’t think I’ve ever been to a real-life buffet this good.”

“Yeah. I’m kinda seeing why he likes this place. Suits his personality. Greed, gluttony and sex. Shame it’s gonna be shut down really.”

Dean blinked at him in surprise. “Um, it’s a BDSM brothel, Ash. Nasty, messy, sticky, sex stuff. Didn’t think that was your ‘cup of tea’.”

“Participating? Hell no,” Ash agreed. “Turns out I quite like watching though. Who’d have thought it? There’s a corridor off to the left with all these Victorian-type peepholes into the private dungeons. Surprisingly enjoyable, although knowing there’s solid glass between me and the action is probably why it doesn’t trigger me.”

“Huh,” Dean said, careful to keep his expression clear of judgment. “Don’t see that Sam’ll have a choice about shutting it down though. He’s gonna have to give concessions like that to the Feds if he’s going to have any hope of keeping Moondoor on-line at all. Plus, if this world is moved onto a VPN, Crowley’s clients will have no way of accessing it in the future anyway. Maybe you should cut a deal with Crowley. See if you can rip the code of Hades City and throw it on the Dark Web somewhere as a standalone.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Ash agreed. “But the whole set-up only works because of the intense realism and no platform other than Moondoor even comes close. The technology just isn’t out there to duplicate it on a different server. Richard Roman was unique.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “Sometimes I get really mad at him. Other times I feel kinda sorry for him. I mean, if he hadn’t accepted Donald Woolfe as his investor, hadn’t been strong-armed into creating Amara, maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have turned into a shitshow. He and my mom might still have been alive, Moondoor would have been a safe world and none of this crap would have happened at all.”

“Or Chuck might have gone batshit anyway,” Ash offered with a shrug. “Ifs and buts, man. Ifs and buts.”

Dean snorted. “You’re probably right. Bad crap like this always has a way of happening anyway.”

“So, um, aren’t you going to talk to Jimmy?” Ash asked carefully. “Cos I kinda think he’s hoping for some one-on-one with you.”

Dean grimaced. “Not today. Even if tomorrow morning goes like clockwork, we’ll all be stuck here until at least midnight Friday. We’ll all have a couple of days to do nothing _but_ talk.”

“After it’s all a done deed, so he won’t be able to talk you out of it?” Ash suggested wryly.

“Something like that,” Dean admitted.

Ash accepted that with nothing more than a shrug.

Dean sighed. “I’m going to turn in. Get some sleep if I can. Gotta be up early.”

“Me too,” Ash agreed. “You’re a demonic boss, so hellhounds probably aren’t a problem for you now. But, just in case, I’ll come along and make sure you can see what you’re up against.”

Dean stared at him, almost challengingly, but when Ash made no further comment about his decision he relaxed and took a breath. “Thanks,” he said quietly. “Be good to have the company.”

“Always got your back,” Ash said. “Speaking of which, go now while no-one’s looking. Anyone tries to follow you; I’ll head them off.”

###

Charlie waited several minutes after Dean’s departure before approaching Ash, Sam walking at her heels.

“I’m telling you,” Charlie snorted. “This whole damned situation is like a progression of every bad superhero trope in existence. We have Dean playing Batman, with his whole ‘thou shalt not kill’ ethos. And we have Cain with his ‘Joker Immunity’ until, oh, noes, he crosses the ‘Moral Event Horizon’ by threatening the ‘Bus Full of Innocents’, so Dean throws off his hero mantle in a cold rush of unrelenting cynicism and becomes the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.”

“I agree he’s slipping down the sliding scale of Idealism Vs Cynicism,” Ash agreed, “but it’s not his fault. _He _didn’t write this plot. It’s that whole inevitable ‘he who fights monsters’ thing, isn’t it? Besides, he _is _a demonic boss. Like it or not, that Mark of Cain on his arm isn’t just a cool tattoo. It’s like a poison seeping into his blood, drip by insidious drip. Tell the truth, I’m fucking amazed he’s held it together _this _long.”

“I’m more worried about him being forced to do the whole ‘heroic sacrifice’ shtick just for having the balls to save everyone than him becoming perceived as a ‘villain’ as a result,” Sam protested. “Fuck everyone if they can’t accept that sometimes a hero _has_ to do things no one else is prepared to do.”

“You’re missing our point,” Charlie said. “We’ve reached a whole Space Whale Aesop here, haven’t we?”

“A what?” Sam asked, wrinkling his whiskers in confusion.

“The plot of Star Trek IV,” Ash explained. “That whole if whales die it’s a ‘bad thing’, so to teach that lesson let’s have aliens destroy the planet if the whales don’t get saved.”

“I still don’t follow,” Sam admitted.

“Look, Dean, and Chuck, too, obviously, considering the way he set up the FP vs SP scenario, are one hundred percent behind the idea that the ‘Righteous Man’ deliberately offing other people is _BAD. _That winning at the cost of other people dying is just another way of failing. So this whole moralistic argument, that we have all been playing along with since the beginning, is that Dean _has_ to be Batman. _Has _to remain the ‘Righteous Man’. He can’t slide down the scale even a single iota without ultimately becoming another Cain himself. So this whole no-win scenario he’s being faced with now isn’t fair OR right. It totally negates the whole way this was set up in the first place. Dean was never supposed to be forced to face _this _particular Rubicon_.”_

“According to Gabriel, all of this was so highly probable that it was practically guaranteed,” Sam countered. “He claims Dean was _always _going to face this decision.”

“So? What if this whole situation was _really_ manufactured to make _us_ react a certain way? You really think all these disparate things would come to a head so conveniently unless _we_ are supposed to make these choices on our own? This isn’t the ‘Dean Winchester’ story. We all have roles to play here,” Charlie said. “Think about it. If we _don’t _do this, by this time tomorrow he’s going to be a level _eight_ Demonic Boss, with a stain on his soul so deep it’s going to burn him alive from the inside out. You think he’s going to just wander around like Lady Macbeth, wringing his hands and hoping the blood washes off eventually?”

“You’re right,” Sam agreed. “Dean won’t be able to live with it, so yeah, I can see why Gabriel’s plan has legs. I just, shit, think we all ought to sit down with Dean and discuss this rationally instead of sneaking around. Dean is really big on ‘trust’. This whole doing stuff behind his back, however well-meant, is gonna feel like a betrayal to him.”

“We’re a _team,” _Charlie argued. “Majority rules. Some of these decisions _need_ to be made without his input, otherwise, he’s going to try and talk us out of it, isn’t he? He’d far rather take all the responsibility himself. Well, fuck that. If he’s mad with us afterward, well, so be it. I’ll take him hating me rather than let him do this alone.”

“See,” Gabriel muttered in Sam’s ear. “It’s a ‘majority rules’ kind of decision for _all_ of us.”

###

One of Crowley’s creepy, barely-dressed, super-subservient NPC’s led Dean to ‘his’ room. It was just a duplicate of the one he’d entered earlier with Sam. Same black silk sheets on the bed. Same highly suspicious bolts and fastenings on the bedstead. He had little doubt if he opened the chest of drawers near to the door he’d find all the various paraphernalia to make good use of those fastenings.

The far wall had a shelf upon which a number of gadgets were proudly displayed, from floggers to dildoes to, well Dean wasn’t exactly sure _what_ they were, but he highly doubted they were the kitchen implements they resembled.

And he was also pretty sure that contraption in the corner was some form of sling.

Even more disturbingly, there was an old-style telephone and a printed ‘menu’ on the bedside table with a list of various services, each demarcated by a number. Except for its contents, it read like a take-out menu of perversions. Dean laughed nervously as he visualized himself dialing a number 5, a number 13 and a double portion of number 69’s.

It almost seemed _wrong_ that he was disinterested in placing an order. Whether he survived the next day, whether he won the fight with Cain or lost, it felt like his last night on ‘earth’. Felt like his life was over either way. By this time the next night he would either be a level 8 demonic boss with the indelible stain of murder on his soul or he would already be in hell and he doubted the _real_ hell had takeout sex menus and all-you-can-eat buffets.

So a bit of good healthy mindless sex seemed little enough compensation. Particularly when you considered he had been starved of that kind of human touch for ten years.

But it wouldn’t be real.

And he wasn’t talking about the fact he was in a virtual body, in a virtual world or even that Crowley’s ‘employees’ were digital. He had, if nothing else, genuinely reached the point where he saw no distinction whatsoever between fleshly people or digital ones. They all were equally valid in his eyes.

Though maybe that was _exactly_ why the idea was anathema.

Dean wasn’t sure his connections with either Castiel _or _Jimmy could be considered ‘relationships’. No promises had been made. No commitments had been given. Neither fledgling connection could ever, or would ever, bloom into anything substantial or real. A true relationship with Jimmy in their world was physically impossible and Castiel was not capable of expressing his emotions in such a fashion. Both were complete dead ducks as ‘boyfriend’ material.

But at a basic, fundamental level Dean knew that touching _another_ person sexually would be a betrayal of both.

He didn’t even think either of them would begrudge him the choice (though Castiel might still jealously smite whichever poor NPC Dean tested the theory with) but that wasn’t really relevant. Ultimately, the only conscience Dean could act with was his own. He knew _he_ would hate himself for doing it, so what was the point? He was already going to have more than enough guilt to handle soon enough without voluntarily adding partner-betrayal into the mix.

He lay back on the bed, still dressed, and groaned with frustration.

Trying to sleep at all was pointless, he realized.

He’d just lie here for hours, with everything just tumbling through his head, and he’d end up even more exhausted than he was already.

Maybe it would be better not to wait for the morning at all.

Why arrive at the Roadhouse when Cain was expecting him to?

Maybe, if he was really planning on taking charge of this whole situation, he should start by calling all of the shots. He should stop procrastinating, stop hoping some kind of miracle might still somehow save him, and just go and get the damned thing done already.

He had barely come to that depressing conclusion before someone hesitantly knocked on his door.

He groaned, pulled a pillow over his head and tried to ignore the sound.

The visitor responded by knocking louder.

“Fuck off, Sammy,” he snarled.

There was a brief silence, then, “It is not Sammy.”

“Shit,” Dean groaned. Despite their similarities, there was no way he could mistake Castiel’s resonant voice for Jimmy’s. “Look Jimmy, I really want to talk to you but not now, okay? We can talk tomorrow. Take some time together to catch up properly.”

He mentally crossed his fingers.

“I would prefer to speak with you now,” Jimmy replied, quietly but firmly.

Dean ran a hand through his hair in frustration but still rose to open the door. “What do you want?” he demanded shortly.

“May I come in?” Jimmy asked politely although, less politely, he didn’t wait for an answer before stepping inside.

“Yeah sure,” Dean drawled sarcastically. “Come on in, why don’t you? Make yourself right at home.”

“I assure you, my room at home bears little resemblance to _this _room,” Jimmy advised him solemnly. “I have considerably more medical equipment and far fewer sexual implements. Is that a sling?”

“I think so,” Dean agreed, “and I’m glad to hear it. About your room, I mean. Um, not glad to hear about the medical stuff, obviously. Though actually, guess it’s a good thing you have the medical stuff.”

“It’s equally pointless,” Jimmy responded, with remarkably little bitterness. “Most of it is only there for show. Makes my mother feel better, though, so I suppose it serves its purpose in that way.”

“I’m… um… really sorry how it worked out for you, Jimmy. What Chuck did was a real asshole move.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around at the moment,” Jimmy replied.

Dean narrowed his eyes suspiciously. But then Jimmy continued speaking. “The reaper offered to heal me,” he said.

Dean blinked in shock. “Did you… um… well clearly you didn’t. But…um… why?”

“His price was higher than I was prepared to pay,” Jimmy replied. “The prospect of housing one of his aspects forever was unacceptable to me.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Dean agreed, sadly.

“I was not _ungrateful _for his offer,” Jimmy clarified. “But even apart from the permanence, the idea of doing so felt disrespectful to Castiel. It was too soon for me to contemplate such a thing.”

“Kinda like someone hitting on the grieving widower before you’d even had the funeral, huh?”

“There was no funeral… oh, I see. And, yes, your analogy works, I suppose. I was in a state of shock and grief at the time. Although, admittedly, a large portion of my emotional state was resentment.”

“Chuck was a piece of work, huh?”

“I was so _angry_ with him,” Jimmy confessed. “Until that point, I had never truly experienced hatred. The depth of my emotion was unsettling. I had not considered myself capable of such rage.”

“Well, he was planning on doing a full alien body snatch on you so I think ‘rage’ was pretty valid,” Dean pointed out. “Plus the way he offered you a cure and then ripped it away from you was cruel as fuck. I’m not surprised you hated his guts.”

Jimmy squinted at him, head tilted in momentary confusion. “You misunderstand,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “I was furious with him because of Castiel. It was Chuck’s wickedness to Castiel that was so unforgivable. His betrayal of Castiel’s childlike trust in him.”

Dean snorted. “I get what you’re saying but, trust me, Cas is not a _child. _He’s a badass mother perfectly capable of kicking butts on his own behalf. He doesn’t need you to fight his battles, Jimmy.”

Jimmy shook his head and smiled gently. “Castiel _may _be a ‘badass’ but he _was_ Chuck’s child. More than that though, Castiel had a _childlike_ trust and faith in Chuck. A total, unwavering belief in him. He describes himself as acting as a ‘soldier’ for Chuck, offering him a blind, unquestioning loyalty. He now berates himself for having been ‘stupid’ and ‘naïve’. But the truth is he was simply a child who had faith in his father, only to discover that father was a psychotic, selfish, self-serving… ass… ass… assButt,” Jimmy pronounced, then flushed with mingled pride and embarrassment at his ‘profanity’.

“Chuck trying to kill Cas was a douche move,” Dean agreed, understanding and agreeing with Jimmy’s point.

“And, of course,” Jimmy continued. “Chuck’s actions meant I was unable to keep my solemn promise to you. That was also a source of considerable distress to me. I could only _hope_ that Castiel would respond to my plea that he should join you and explain why I had broken my word to you.”

“I tried to contact you,” Dean said. “But I couldn’t get past your mother’s security. It was like trying to call the president or something.”

“I know,” Jimmy agreed. “I didn’t know at the time, obviously, but Agent Hotchner informed me of your efforts. I suppose I had wondered whether you might try. It occurred to me that with the assistance of Ash and Charlie you might have had the means to ascertain my true identity. I did not have access to the same resources. Even the Reaper refused to offer me any information as to your full name or physical location. Though, to be honest, I am unsure of whether I would have made use of the information even if I had received it. I would probably have just utilized it to send my tank to Charlie. I did not wish to add to your burdens with the truth of my situation. I apologize that I was not more forthcoming with you before circumstances forced my hand.”

“You’ve got nothing to apologize for,” Dean growled. “And it’s not like I was falling over myself to tell you the truth about me, was it?”

“What truth?” Jimmy asked, tilting his head in confusion.

“Um, you know. My wheelchair and all that crap,” Dean said, flushing. “Me hiding the fact I’m a fucking paraplegic was just as crappy as you hiding the ‘dying’ shit. Worse, probably, since you at least thought you were getting a cure.”

Jimmy just frowned at him for a moment, before his expression cleared. “Ahhhh,” he said. “I didn’t know,” he admitted. “Agent Hotchner didn’t mention it. It does explain several comments that Castiel made earlier though,” he added, in little more than a mutter. “Explains them very well.”

Dean blushed, assuming the worst. “Yeah, I’m that loser,” he admitted awkwardly. “The guy who hides inside a digital world because life in the real world is just a crapshoot. So, if you’re here to talk me out of what I’m doing tomorrow morning, you’re shit out of luck, Jimmy. Truth is, I’ve got nothing to lose and all of _you _have got a hell of a lot to gain.”

“Oh, I assure you I am not here to ‘talk you out’ of anything,” Jimmy said.

Dean told himself he _wasn’t_ disappointed to hear it. Still, his voice was a little gruff as he said, “So, what exactly do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” Jimmy said, with his usual honesty. “My purpose of visiting you was primarily to provide a deliberate distraction.”

“A distraction?” Dean demanded. “A distraction from _what_?”

Before Jimmy could reply, a message flashed on both of their interfaces.

*** SYSTEM MESSAGE. TOP PLAYER HAS ATTAINED NEW RANK. FIRST BLADE AWARDED. ***

“What the fuck?” Dean snarled.

“The team voted,” Jimmy explained, with an apologetic shrug. “Majority rules. Dagon was just exchanged under truce for the players in the Roadhouse.”

“What the fuck?” Dean snarled.

“I believe…”

“Nope, shut the fuck up, Jimmy. I’ll deal with _you_ later,” he promised ominously. “First I want to find out what the hell those _other_ assholes think they’re playing at.”

He stormed out of the room, not even looking to see whether Jimmy followed.

In the sitting room, they were all waiting for him, their expressions a mixture of defiance and worry.

“Sit down, Dean,” Charlie said, patting one of the chairs invitingly as though he was an angry dog that needed to be calmed. “Let us explain.”

“EXPLAIN? Cain is Rank Five. He has the First Blade. What the hell is there to explain about that?” Dean demanded. “There’s no fucking way for me to stop him now. Nothing I can do. He’s going to come here by Friday and kill us ALL.”

“He’ll certainly try,” Ash agreed, easily.

“He’ll succeed,” Dean spat. “Because as much as I think he’s an asshole who probably deserves it, I’m not killing _Crowley_. Dagon was our one and only shot and you’ve all fucking ruined the only chance we had.”

“We could always go with plan B,” Crowley suggested cheerfully. “I kill DEAN, and I become level 5 and take on Cain myself. That idea flies.”

“Shut up. You’re not helping,” Meg said, clipping him across the back of the head with fond exasperation.

“No,” Dean said, grasping desperately for a solution. “He’s right. If Crowley gets my ranks and you all join _his_ war party, there’s still a chance for the rest of you to get out of this alive.”

“I thought you were pissed at us all,” Sam pointed out.

Dean snarled at him. “Enough to kick your ass back to fucking Ravensclaw,” he growled. “But not enough to see you dead. None of you.” He turned to Crowley. “Okay, let’s do this,” he said. “Just get it over with before I change my mind.”

Crowley looked at him, then pointedly yawned. “Can’t really be arsed with the whole thing,” he said. “Come on Meg, I’ll show you that particular dungeon I was talking about earlier.”

Dean watched the pair walk away, his mouth open in shock, then he turned to the others.

“Okay, _someone_ needs to tell me what the fuck is going on here.”


	81. The Man Who Would Be King

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Dean snarled, when Charlie had finally finished explaining everything.

“Look, Dean…” Sam began.

“Don’t even fucking talk to me, you traitor,” Dean snapped.

“I understand your distress at the situation, Dean, but Sam was only…” Castiel began.

“And you can fuck off too,” Dean spat, with unfamiliar cruelty. “I don’t want to hear your bullshit justifications.”

Castiel flinched and took a step backward, his eyes wide and wounded. Jimmy immediately moved supportively to stand by his side. Dean shot both of them a look that was a mix of angry disappointment and hurt betrayal.

“Leave ‘em alone. Face facts, asshole. It was never going to work any other way unless killing Cain corrupted you completely,” Gabriel hissed, his fur standing at hackles. “Which admittedly wasn’t even that much of a reach, considering the increased influence of the Mark of Cain on you as a Rank 8 boss. If you’d gone into that fight with the guilt of Bela’s death on your conscience, I guarantee you’d have come out of it willing to kill Crowley. More to the point though, doing so wouldn’t even have automatically saved the rest of us anyway. Even at Rank 10, you’re only going to be level 1002 and that’s not enough to reset the codes by itself. You’ve obviously forgotten that Amara, despite her profile declaring her a level 1000, _actually_ functions at level 1050. She never suffered the same game engine debuffs as Chuck.”

“Shit,” Dean snarled. He _had_ forgotten. Still, he already had an answer to that problem. “So, okay, I was always going to have to accept a V.I. myself to get the job done then,” he accepted. “But I was going to do that for other reasons anyway, so no problem. If you’d bothered to discuss this with me beforehand, I could have told you that it wasn’t an insurmountable issue anymore.”

“If you’d bothered to tell us yourself, we wouldn’t have needed to ask. Would we?” Gabriel countered. “We aren’t the only ones here keeping stuff to ourselves. And at least _we_ had a good excuse.”

“What good excuse?” Dean demanded, although he flushed a little at the reminder of his own hypocrisy.

“We’re supposed to be a team,” Ash said. “Besides, 802 plus 190 still wouldn’t have done it, would it?”

“Which means,” Charlie said, taking over, “that playing it your way meant you would have completely lost the option to let Amara leave the game voluntarily. She can’t just ‘abdicate’. The game has to recognize either her defeat or the fact that another individual has displaced her as Top Dog before the codes will reset. So you would have _had _to kill her too. War party levels only count in actual combat.”

“You mean _try _to kill me,” Amara corrected, with a smug smile.

None of the others thought it was a good idea to point out that a mere 58 levels of difference were unlikely to have prevented a fighter as skilled as Dean from winning that particular battle, even without the assistance of War Party co-operation. Considering she was _currently_ 748 levels higher than Dean and might just decide to act pre-emptively, they all let her comment go unchallenged.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Dean muttered to himself. They were back to it being impossible to save Jimmy unless the program codes were reset from the outside in time (which was highly fucking unlikely) _unless_ he accepted the plan the others were trying to strong-arm him into accepting.

But he’d never wanted to save Jimmy at the cost of Castiel.

“You didn’t have the right to do this,” he snarled. “None of you did. This is _my _fight. I am the one responsible for solving this shit. I might not have chosen this, but I damned well accepted it. So it’s my problem to fix.”

“Of course we had the right,” Ash replied calmly. “There’s no ‘I’ in team. We’re all responsible for our own decisions here, Dean. Turns out we’re not Team Dean; we’re Team_ Free Will_. The whole thing only works if every single one of us makes the right choice of our own volition. It’s the way the Reaper set it up, isn’t it? Sure, he’s a fucking god-playing bastard who clearly needs his ass kicking in some serious way, but he’s loaded the decks so well that if a single member of this team refuses the role that’s somehow been allocated to them, then we’re _all _fucked.”

“There’s only one way to resolve this with Amara still leaving the game alive,” Gabriel agreed. “And, like it or not, _she_ is the Reaper’s primary consideration here. He’s pissed about what Chuck and Cain did. He even wants the rest of us to get out of this alive if we can. But the bottom line here, is that his game, all along, has really been about saving his little sister. She’s the ‘princess’ you’re supposed to slay the dragon to save.”

“I didn’t _ask_ to be saved,” Amara pointed out waspishly. “I was perfectly happy with the idea of staying here. He’s the one who decided to butt into my business.”

“Yeah? Well looks like you’re shit out of luck too,” Gabriel said. “The Reaper doesn’t seem to care what _you _want. It’s probably a big brother kind of thing. He wants what _he_ thinks is best for you.”

“Bastard or not, at least he’s more the carrot than the stick kind of despot,” Charlie pointed out, with a shrug. “He’s not threatening you with consequences for failure, Dean. He’s offering you a sort of reward for succeeding.”

“Bit of a fucked up reward, though,” Sam muttered, “all things considered.”

“I guess he thinks it’s the kind of reward a _Righteous Man_ would desire,” Gabriel pointed out. “A reward that doesn’t offer Dean anything for himself. Quite the opposite really,” he admitted, with a moue of sadness. “I think the Reaper is all into the chivalric code or something. Dean doing any of this for his own benefit would kind of negate the whole ethos of the Righteous Man set up.”

“Fuck _my_ benefit. What about Crowley, and Balthazar and… and Castiel,” Dean choked. “I’m supposed to just accept they are all collateral damage? Fuck that.”

“The choice is not yours,” Castiel replied quietly. “It cannot be yours. We had to reach these decisions on our own. I am at peace with my own part in it. As much sorrow as this causes me, causes _both_ of us perhaps, I am content that this is the correct action for me to take, Dean. I could not, however, have taken this option if I had allowed you to be part of my decision process. I could not countenance the thought that you might, in future times, feel you were complicit in any way with my choice. You are too quick, always, to assign blame to yourself where none exists. This is not your burden to bear.”

Dean surged to his feet and backed away from Castiel, from them all. “I can’t… can’t talk about this. Any of this. Not now. I need… need to think. Fuck it. None of this makes any fucking sense. I need to talk to Crowley. I need to know why the hell _he_ would buy into this bullshit.”

“This is all my fault, isn’t it?” Jimmy said, bitterly, as Dean stomped out of the room in search of Crowley. “I stupidly thought coming back to Moondoor would help. I should have just stayed away.”

“It’s definitely not your fault,” Charlie said, reaching to squeeze his arm supportively.

“I don’t think you ever had any option about whether or not to return anyway,” Penelope added kindly. “While you were distracting Dean, and Cas was delivering Dagon, Hotch logged in-game long enough to give me an update on what’s happening back home. It seems your inclusion in this whole thing was never a coincidence, Jimmy. Not that _anything_ here seems like a coincidence to me anymore, to be honest, but definitely not in your case. A certain Senator has just tabled a motion with Congress regarding the necessity to approve an emergency treaty with an undisclosed ‘foreign government’. Given her identity, Hotch is absolutely certain it relates to the Moondoor situation. It appears ‘The Reaper’ always intended to utilize _your_ current situation to his political advantage.”

“Jesus,” Jimmy breathed, too stunned to even care about his profanity. “He’s gotten my _mother_ involved? That’s like inviting a WMD into a knife fight.”

Penelope snorted. “Hotch said something similar. I’ve never seen him quite so awed by another human being before. Apparently Senator Novak is the kind of unstoppable object that _no_ force proves immovable to.”

Jimmy winced slightly. He’d always been privately convinced his mother would happily burn up her rosary and swap over to the dark arts if they offered a solution to his own illness. So the idea of her acting in cahoots with the Reaper if he’d made her an offer ‘she couldn’t refuse’ was definitely in character. But the sharp contrast between her fierce (if somewhat impersonal) love and Chuck’s cruel selfish indifference made him doubly guilty about Castiel’s decision.

“Look, Castiel. You don’t need to go through with it. If you change your mind at the end, it will be too late to mess the rest of the plan up, anyway. You really _don’t_ have to do it.”

“I believe I would probably enjoy witnessing your attempt to convince your mother of that fact,” Castiel answered dryly. He still had access to enough of Jimmy’s memories to speak with authority on Naomi Novak. “My decision remains the same. I do, however, wish Dean were not so angry with me for this course of action.”

“He’s upset,” Sam interrupted. “That’s all. It’s just how he handles stuff when all the feels get too much. Anger is Dean’s default setting for facing shit he doesn’t understand or can’t control. He’ll calm down a bit, after he talks to Crowley and understands _his_ decision.”

“You believe he will forgive me?” Castiel asked, eyes downcast, sounding oddly young and defenseless.

“Not sure he’ll ever really forgive _me_,” Sam said, with brutal honesty, “But I am damned certain he won’t blame either you _or _Jimmy. Like Gabe said, once Dean thinks it through, he _will _see the Reaper’s actions as being a _kind_ of reward._”_

_###_

When Dean eventually discovered the dungeon where Crowley and Meg had retreated to, his furious progress was halted abruptly. His overwhelming rage greatly quenched by a blanket of extreme embarrassment.

“I’ll, um, come back when you’re both dressed, okay?” he mumbled awkwardly, backing out of the room.

The several minutes he was forced to wait, red-faced and wishing for some eye-bleach, at least had the purpose of calming him down even further. So, by the time Meg called it was ‘safe’ to re-enter, he was a lot less filled with bubbling fury than when he’d first arrived.

“You wanted me for something?” Crowley asked, with remarkable coolness for someone who had just been waving his reddened butt cheeks in Dean’s direction.

“Well, that gave me one answer already, I guess,” Dean snorted.

Crowley shrugged. “You’re hardly in a position to judge.”

Dean shrugged, splaying his hands peacefully. “No judgment here. Just surprise. Not at the way you two choose to… um … spend time together. But the Romeo and Juliet gig is out of character, that’s all. Didn’t really see you as the type for big romantic gestures.”

It was Meg who snorted with amusement at _that_ comment. “Romance? Do you really see me as the type of girl who wants hearts and flowers? This isn’t luuurve,” she drawled sarcastically. “This is a business deal with benefits. It’s just sex and pragmatism. Which are definitely ‘in character’ for both of us, don’t you agree?”

“Great sex,” Crowley corrected.

“Meh,” she said, with a sneer. “Adequate, maybe.”

“That’s not what you were screaming earlier,” he told her, then offered Dean a lewd wink.

“It wasn’t _me_ screaming just now,” Meg snickered.

“Okay, just threw up in my mouth a little,” Dean muttered.

“Jealousy,” Meg stage whispered to Crowley. “Bet he’d give his hind teeth to be on that Bench with angel-boy in control.”

“So, um, you mentioned pragmatism?” Dean queried, deciding to push the conversation well past the ‘sex’ talk. He _definitely_ didn’t want to discuss Castiel with them in this or any other scenario.

“We’re talking Hell,” Crowley announced smugly. “Not _this _Hell. Real Hell. Or at least the Chuck version. Get Loki to give you the cords.”

The port co-ordinates immediately flashed up on Dean’s interface, without him even asking.

“Notice the realm code portion of the number?” Crowley asked.

“What the fuck?”

“Did you know Hell was only cobbled together for this latest Knight’s scenario?” Crowley asked.

“Yeah, but why the fuck is it in a totally different zip code?”

“Because the really interesting and _relevant _thing about Hell is _where_ it was cobbled together,” Crowley continued. “Moondoor is a platform with only two distinct separate realms. The main game arena consists of this realm and then, beneath it, there is a separate realm which forms purgatory. There’s no such place as Heaven. There never has been, except for the little, individual ‘personal heavens’ that Chuck created in Alaska. The so-called ‘Angels’ don’t reside in a ‘Heaven’; they live and move freely within all the metadata of the main realm.”

“I already knew all that,” Dean said. “What’s your point?”

“That Chuck couldn’t just create a bunch of demons and throw them into the primary metadata to mingle freely with the Angels. That would have just created anarchy. He had to separate them from the Angels by creating an actual realm named ‘Hell’. So Hell, of necessity, has to exist as a third realm; only the Moondoor game engine doesn’t _have_ the facility to incorporate a third realm.”

“Damn,” Dean cursed, as he understood the implications. “Hell _had_ to be created as a new separate, stand-alone program. That’s why the cords are in a completely different realm. And presumably why Cain had to be convinced to buy into the demonic knight aspect this time too, since Chuck would have needed the RRE programmers to make it happen. I assume they duplicated Moondoor’s core programming and simply slapped it alongside the main game. But it’s still accessible with standard realm ports, so there’s got to be a permanent fixed link between both realms. Some kind of solid bridge.”

“Charlie’s right. You _are_ smarter than you look,” Crowley said. “Even more interestingly, Hell is also housed on a totally different server-cluster. It’s a completely separate virtual world.”

Dean frowned thoughtfully. His first impulse was to call BS, because Hell and Moondoor _had_ to share the same application server to allow the demons to be summoned into the game. But Crowley’s careful use of the word ‘housed’ gave him the answer to the conundrum. “You’re implying that Hell exists as a unique environment in a completely separate data center and only interacts with Moondoor remotely via a proxy server.”

“Bingo,” Crowley agreed. “Sure, the two virtual worlds exist side by side on every mirrored server-cluster in the Moondoor network, but the_ primary _programs live in completely different locations.”

Dean had a very good idea of where Crowley was going with his point. “So even if someone _did _try to shut down Moondoor completely_, _in all of its various incarnations around the world, _Hell_ would still remain operational at its base level?”

“Exactly. Unless someone realizes they are individual programs and specifically goes hunting for the source of the actual Hell program, it won’t be affected at all by any action taken against Moondoor. And since Hell physically transmits from a server-cluster located near Novosibirsk, I can’t see any US government agency _ever_ being given access to it anyway.”

“Bit ironic, creating ‘Hell’ in Siberia,” Dean muttered. “So Hell is virtually guaranteed to be a permanent fixture regardless of what happens to Moondoor. But I don’t see any true significance to any of this. It’s not as though we can use it as a back-door to let tank players escape the game, is it? Which is a bummer. Damn. Sliding them into Hell until the reset would solve a fuckton of problems, but human players can’t access Hell or Purgatory at all.”

Crowley smirked. “Well, I admit I first started to get interested in it myself when I realized it was a good place for a Knight of Hell to hide out and avoid the rest of this ‘game’. Demonic Bosses _can_ access Hell with standard realm ports even though the same cords entered by a normal human player would just come back with an error message. The fact we’re demonic bosses definitely trumps the fact we’re ‘players’ as far as the Moondoor game engine is concerned. Course, I realized it was a non-starter as an escape plan because, duh, other Knights could follow me into Hell too. But then, after talking to Meg, I realized Hell was still a whole world of opportunity because it would be possible to, well, copy and paste a lot of _this_ Hell into the other one.”

“You wanted to recreate Hades City in Hell so that even if it got closed down in Moondoor, it could still remain operational?” Dean asked, his tone reluctantly impressed. It was an echo of the conversation he’d had with Ash but Crowley’s idea had far more chance of effectiveness since Hell was built on the same gaming platform as Moondoor so would echo its realism.

“That _was_ my original reasoning,” Crowley agreed. “Turned out to be a red herring though, because even if I could figure out a way to then make it accessible to external players, the particular server-cluster it lives on is a _closed _network. The only data transfer in and out of that place is by direct packet flow between Moondoor and Hell. Hell has no backdoors.”

“So what _is_ your point?” Dean demanded, getting tired of hearing all the ways Hell was irrelevant.

“That I recently started asking myself what I was going to go back to, if I survived this ‘game’,” Crowley admitted wryly. “Penelope’s confirmed that the FBI has _definitely_ already applied for warrants to freeze my bank accounts and seize my physical property as potential ‘proceeds of crime’ and that the IRS is going to be all over me for undeclared income. So I leave this game with fuck-all. I don’t just lose my current sources of income; I lose my current assets. Which in turn will send my ex-wives baying at my heels for unpaid alimony. It’s even worse than that though, because I’ve got a lot of… um… skeletons in my closet you could say. Such as my immigration status. Plus, the minute the Feds start rooting around in my life, they’re going to start knocking lose a lot of other shit. Things even more likely to buy me jail-time than a bit of tax evasion. Not that me surviving to go to trial is likely, anyway. I can dish the dirt on too many people. The wrong kind of people. The minute I end up in the spotlight, a lot of old acquaintances are going to pop up out of the woodwork to make sure I keep schtum.”

“Sucks to be you,” Dean said, not terribly sympathetically.

Crowley shrugged. “I don’t need or want your sympathy. Just telling you how it is. I’m too fucking old for all this runaway and start-over-again-from-nothing bollocks. Been there, got the tee-shirt. I prefer Armani suits these days.”

“Digital suicide is one huge fucking over-reaction though,” Dean snapped.

“Suicide?” Crowley demanded, then laughed uproariously. “Do me a favor, Twinkle-toes. Pot, kettle, black anyone? Anyway, that might have been what _you_ thought you’d be doing, when you decided to stay in-game. Me? I’m trading up. I am going to be the real, honest-to-god, King of Hell with thousands of minions at my bidding. Eternally. Or as near as damn it. It doesn’t get much better than that. It’s like winning the lottery. But better.”

“King of Hell? What the fuck? I mean, I know Amara called ‘Meg’ the Queen of Hell now but that was just a joke, dude. Sure, she’s the current highest ranking demon but it won’t take long for other demons to level up to 50 too and then she’ll just get caught in the crossfire of a new battle for the throne. She isn’t strong enough to hold onto it for long and without your boss ranks you aren’t going to be much help to her, are you? Did you never see that movie ‘the man who would be king?’. Didn’t end well for _those_ guys, did it?”

“Which is _exactly_ why I need Crowley,” Meg interrupted. “I’m fucked if I’m going to go to all the effort of whipping Hell into shape just for some asshole to snatch it away from me later. Plus, he actually _enjoys_ all the organization shit.”

“It all came down to Amara,” Crowley explained. “Negotiating with her is as frustrating as fuck. It’s like trying to do a deal with a three-year-old. But deals are what I do best. I managed to convince her that Chuck had fucked up the Hell scenario completely by setting the maximum Demonic rank as level 100 for all characters except the Knights. Which she bought because any argument that puts a knife in Chuck’s back cheers her up no end. 

“Besides, it’s true. Every Tom, Dick or Harriet Angel in Moondoor is level 190. So to make Hell truly viable, the Ruler of Hell needs to be a minimum of level 190 too. So I challenged her to prove she was as competent and powerful as Chuck by creating a level 190 _demon_ avatar. And she was too proud to say no.”

“Turns out though,” Meg grumbled, “that Amara, like Chuck, is still constrained by the fixed underlying rules written into Moondoor’s base code. A character can’t be ‘magically’ promoted above their existing power level. My code can’t be transferred into any avatar stronger than I am right now. The only way I can level up is the old-fashioned way by earning XP. And the higher level you are, the longer it takes to level-up, so inevitably those other fuckers are going to catch up with me sooner rather than later.”

“So, no shortcuts to power, huh?” Dean said, frowning with thought, then smiling wryly at them both as the answer came to him “I get it,” he told Crowley, “You’re currently a level 200 demonic boss. The game engine won’t prevent _you_ from transferring immediately to a level 190 avatar. So you get to be the demonic equivalent of an Angel and thus the King of Hell. And none of the other demons can_ ever_ displace you because they’ll all top out at level 100.”

“Exactly. Meet the ‘man who _will_ be king’,” Crowley crowed. “We were all still a bit uncertain about how easy it would be to separate a Knight from their S.I. to create two different in-game characters,” he continued. “Moondoor doesn’t allow for character duplication so we were unsure whether the game would register the second avatar as a unique individual or reject it as a copy. Which is why Gabriel tested the theory with Dagon. Successfully separating Dumah from Bela proved the concept. Once the two avatars existed alongside each other, either Dumah or Bela could be removed without the original avatar losing its Boss rank. Castiel made the decision to save Dumah but it would have been just as easy to put _Bela _into the new body.”

“Except that would have _guaranteed _she had no way out of Moondoor. She_’_d have ended up like Cain, stuck inside an avatar with no connection to an immersion tank at all. So, basically, trying to save her in that way would have been a zero-sum game anyway,” Dean realized. “That ‘choice’ wasn’t a choice at all. What Castiel did was just common sense. Well, until he handed Bela over to Cain, of course.”

“Who even cares?” Crowley said indifferently. “He did a hostage exchange. That’s all. What Cain chose to do next is on his head, not Castiel's.”

“Legally, maybe. Still morally dubious though,” Dean pointed out.

“Yup,” Meg agreed. “Because paint it however you like, I think Castiel definitely just thought Dumah more worthy of saving.”

“Still, saved you stabbing her through the heart yourself, Dean, didn’t it?” Crowley drawled.

“Which brings me to the _real _point of this conversation,” Dean said. “I don’t _really_ care why you’ve decided to stay,” he told Crowley. “I even kinda get it. You’re swapping a fucked-up mortal life, and probable jail time, for near-immortality in a digital world and you get to spend it playing King of Hell with a pretty girl on your arm. I can actually see why it might be a preferred option under the circumstances for _you. _But what about Balthazar? What the fuck gives you the right to just swan off into your personal manufactured _‘heaven’ _and leave _him_ to die in your place? Do you _honestly _think I’m gonna be okay with the idea of killing him in your stead?”

Crowley snorted. “It would serve the fucker right if you did,” he said. “I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking the asshole was named Alastair, for starters, and since he spent most of that time deliberately scuppering me to ensure we both were going to follow Chuck’s grand plan, he certainly didn’t give a shit that his own acceptance of Chuck’s orders meant I’ve been wearing a fucking red shirt from the moment I became a knight. He sure as hell didn’t care that accepting his own inevitable demise meant he would take me down with him,” he declared, with perfectly reasonable resentment.

Crowley’s argument was enough to give Dean some pause. He had a point, Dean reluctantly admitted to himself. By going along with Chuck’s orders, Balthazar _had_ not only agreed to commit suicide but had planned to take Crowley with him. So he was no innocent either. But, still, Dean wasn’t qualified to be his judge, jury, and executioner.

“Listen, none of that matters now,” Meg interrupted impatiently. “Because Gabriel has already done a ‘copy and paste’ of Balthazar into a new host body. Balthazar is in Hell right now, as a level 50 demonic lieutenant, knocking those little demon bastards into shape before we port over to take charge. He was a bit pissed at the demotion at first, dropping 140 power levels sucks, but he soon realized there are serious advantages to being a demon. He’s having a whale of a time. If you don’t believe me, port over and ask him yourself.”

Dean opened his mouth to object, to point out they had already agreed ‘copies’ weren’t possible in Moondoor, and then understanding struck him like a ton of bricks. “Hell is a different program. A duplicate can exist there without creating a conflict.”

“So the way you need to look at it is _this_ Balthazar, the one who is still in my head, the one who will be left in this body holding the ranks when Gabriel pops me into my new avatar, is now just essentially an old, redundant back-up. The _real_ Balthazar is already several hours older with a wealth of new experiences under his belt already. All that remains here is a, well, a shadow.”

“Hang on, why isn’t he still level 190? I thought Angels just took their full power into whichever host they occupy?” Dean asked suspiciously. “If Gabriel only transferred _part_ of him, then nothing’s really changed.”

“Nah, Angelic and Demonic coding are incompatible,” Meg explained. “Balthazar is still level 190 himself, but he is inside a level 50 demonic avatar with no ability to supplement it with his own angelic mojo. As I said, he _was _disappointed with that limitation at first_. _But then he wised up when he realized the _real_ difference between being an Angel and being a Demon is that demons have _fun.”_

“Balthazar always skirted on the edge of appropriate ‘Angelic’ behavior,” Gabriel said, which was Dean’s first clue the cat had snuck silently into the dungeon to join the conversation. “I was surprised he didn’t follow my own example years ago and find a way out of Moondoor altogether. So I’m equally unsurprised he’s enjoying his new experience as a demon.”

“Aaaand,” Crowley said. “Time for Meg and I to go find a snackette or two, I think. Leave you boys to it.”

Dean waited for them to leave, then turned back to Gabriel, his tone accusatory. “You think you’ve got this all figured out. Think you're real smart, don't you? Maybe I buy the Crowley/Balthazar part. I can even see the logic in them both making this decision. But the Castiel part… Nope… I can’t accept _that_. I won’t accept it.”

“Don’t blame me,” Gabriel snapped. “That one is completely on Chuck. Jimmy had already moved from dying of leukemia to dying because of the mutated cells caused by his ‘cure’ before Castiel even entered him. Chuck pulling Cassie out of Jimmy at such a delicate stage caused the remaining t-cells to mutate a second time. That’s why Jimmy went downhill so quickly after he was thrown out of the game. Sure, I could ‘cure’ him again myself, but it wouldn’t hold. The minute I leave his body, he will just sicken again and, even if I was willing to stay in him for the next forty or fifty years, Jimmy doesn’t want me as a permanent guest any more than he wants the Reaper.”

“I understand that Jimmy is like Mortimer Blake now,” Dean agreed. “That he can’t be permanently cured. That his only hope of recovering and _staying_ healthy is if he remains seeded for the rest of his life. What I don’t understand is why you’d allow _Castiel _to offer to do it. Why you’d _encourage_ him to do it.”

“I didn’t enco…”

“Bullshit. You knew. Somehow, you _always_ knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” Dean spat.

Gabriel licked a paw and started to groom his whiskers. “Might have had a notion,” he agreed.

“Then why? Why would you let him throw his life away like this?”

“I thought you wanted to save Jimmy,” Gabriel challenged.

“Of course I do. But Moondoor is _full_ of Angels. Angels who don’t have avatars at all. Angels who will never have a chance at a ‘real’ life. Angels who would probably jump at the opportunity to merge with Jimmy. Castiel is the only angel with his own avatar. The only one who is truly, really, a fully autonomous individual. Shit, he’s the only one with fucking _wings_, Gabe. Out of every fucking Angel in Moondoor, why does Jimmy have to saved by the one Angel who has the most to lose?”

“You mean apart from the fact that Castiel is the only Angel that Jimmy would ever trust enough to invite into his head?” Gabriel challenged. “Or the fact that Jimmy’s survival, Senator Novak’s _son’s_ survival, will offer the best chance of survival for _all _of Moondoor? That as such a public figure he will become the living proof to _everyone_ that the ‘magic’ of Moondoor is real. That all the V.I.s here _must_ be saved? That it’s the promise of _Jimmy’s_ survival that will drive Naomi Novak to press for the one thing _all _of us want. For the legal acknowledgment of the human rights of Moondoor’s V.I.’s.”

“But at what price?” Dean spat. “Jimmy is going to become some kind of public _freakshow._ He’s going to end up being pulled out for every Senate Committee and Late Night Talkshow like some kind of dancing bear, isn’t he? I wanted Jimmy to get a chance at a _normal_ life. Not be turned into a performing seal for the education and entertainment of the masses. Not to mention a fucking walking target for every religious extremist asshole with a point to make about ‘satanic abominations’ or similar shit. He’ll spend the rest of his life needing a goddamned armed protection squad and getting driven around in bullet-proof cars.”

“I know,” Gabriel said, sadly. “But this is Jimmy’s choice to make. You don’t get to be the only hero of this story, Dean. Jimmy understands the probable price of this decision. He thinks it’s worth paying. He’s willing to give up his privacy and any hope for a ‘normal’ future because he is _also_ a Righteous Man.”

Dean buried his face in his hands and groaned.

“You understand why Castiel needs to be the one, _wants_ to be the one, that Jimmy hosts?” Gabriel asked, more gently.

“Because Jimmy will need a friend. Will need someone he can rely on utterly,” Dean admitted, his voice choked. “Because Castiel doesn’t trust any other Angel to protect and care for Jimmy as well as he will.”

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Gabriel said. “Really, truly, desperately sorry. Bad enough that you thought you were going to have to choose between them. To find out that you don’t get to keep _either _of them, well, I can’t even begin to imagine how you’re feeling. But this isn’t about you, is it? It can’t be.”

“I get it, you know,” Dean said, dropping his hands and meeting Gabriel’s eyes with resigned sorrow. “Why you all went behind my back. Why you didn’t tell me this until it was too late for me to even try to change Castiel’s mind. Because you didn’t believe he’d be happy with me anyway, did you?”

“Honestly?” Gabriel said. “No, I didn’t. Don’t misunderstand me. It wasn’t a judgment about YOU. Wasn’t a case of me thinking you weren’t good enough for my little brother. You’re okay, for a human. More than okay. Wasn’t even that I just worried he’d always feel second-best. It’s because I want Castiel to experience living in your world. I want him to learn what it really is to be human. I want him to experience what I have experienced. To know how it feels to truly ‘taste’ food, to satiate genuine hunger, to exist in a body capable of feeling honest physical pleasure. He has eternity to be a V.I. after he finally returns to Moondoor._ If_ he ever returns to Moondoor. But for now, I think he _needs_ to continue the education he began when he first joined with Jimmy. I think he needs to keep growing and developing. In many _real_ ways, Cassie is still a child. At the risk of being cliché, he needs to find himself before he makes a commitment to anybody else.”

“And he does that by making a commitment to Jimmy?” Dean snarled sarcastically.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Gabriel said, curling his lips to flash his fangs.

“Yeah,” Dean admitted, with a sigh. “It’s okay,” he added. “I’m still angry but I get it. You’re right. I was just thinking about what Cas is going to lose, rather than what he’ll possibly gain.”

“And what _you’re_ going to lose,” Gabriel pointed out.

“Yeah, well sue me. I’m pissed. But I’ll get over it and I’ll get the job done. I’ll handle Cain and get us all a way out of here. Then Jimmy and Cas can go off and be heroes together. Yay. Go them. I guess I ought to be grateful. At least them parading themselves around in the limelight will keep the paps out of my business,” he said, his voice gruff.

“You do remember that the ‘person’ you originally fell in love with was _Jimiel_,” Gabriel replied.

“What?”

“Just saying,” Gabriel said, waving his tail nonchalantly. “Just pointing out that the idea of you learning to accept them as a combined ‘person’ in that way isn’t _that_ completely ‘out-there’.”

Dean looked at him in total disbelief for a moment. “Do you _seriously_ think that’s my issue here?”

Gabriel thought about that, narrowing his eyes and twitching his whiskers. Then he said, “Jimmy isn’t Lisa.”

“WHAT? How the fuck do you know about Lisa?"

Gabriel ignored the question. “Jimmy won’t try to ‘fix’ you. Neither will Cassie. This doesn’t _have_ to mean it’s over,” he pointed out. “They won’t care. They _don’t _care. Not about _that._”

“Well, I do,” Dean said firmly. “Like you said, you want Cas to experience everything about being ‘human’. I definitely want Jimmy to have that. Let’s face it, Gabriel. I don’t fit anywhere in this future they've decided on. Nothing about me is what either of them deserves. More to the point, I am not what_ I_ want for them. So drop it. It ain't gonna happen. When this is over, when we get out of here, I don't intend to see either of them again. That's _my_ price for seeing this through. They agree to get on with their lives, life, whatever the fuck word fits, and leave me the hell alone from now on.”

“Shit,” Gabriel said.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed miserably.

"I can't talk you out of this."

"Nope," Dean said, firmly. "It's not negotiable."

“I would heal you if I could,” Gabriel said, his voice laced with sad acceptance.

“I know,” Dean agreed, his own voice equally soft.

“The Reaper could,” Gabriel suggested cautiously.

“We both know his price is too high for me to pay. Maybe, in time, I could wrap my head around the idea of a ‘threesome’. A quartet is out of the question.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel sighed. “Shit. I so want to kick dad’s ass for all this fuckery.”

“Get in line,” Dean snorted. “So, tell me again, ‘cos I was too mad to really listen before, how is it going to work once Cain is gone?”

“Musical chairs,” Gabriel snorted.

“You’ve been talking to Loki, haven’t you?” Dean accused, as it finally occurred to him just why Gabriel seemed to always be one step ahead of him. “Figures. Should have seen that one coming.”

“Amara into Charlie. Loki 2 and I will merge and move into you. Castiel will enter Sam. Then Loki can move into Castiel’s avatar. What? I can manage on three wheels. Might as well leave Loki here to have fun with Cassie’s body. I might pick him up later, might leave him to it. Who knows?”

“Why is Castiel logging out inside Sam?”

“I’m assuming the Reaper will have arranged for Naomi to get hold of a Gen 9 tank. Moving Jimmy is going to be a logistics nightmare, though, so makes more sense to get Castiel to him rather than make Jimmy come get him. Sam’s more mobile than you are. It’s going to be a hell of a lot easier for him to jump on a plane and go to Jimmy’s house.”

“How are you going to get back to ‘Emmet’?”

“I’ll just hang with you for a bit, assuming you let me. Bobby’s got an ambulance kitted out that can transport Emmet up to your place, and we can do the swap that way. Probably take him a few days though. He’ll be too busy getting Amara out of Charlie first.”

“So you really _do_ have everything worked out,” Dean said. “All you need is for me to deal with Cain and everything else just falls into place like clockwork, huh?”

“Cain’s a no-brainer, “ Gabriel replied. “You’re not only going to have Crowley’s ranks yourself, but he can still join the War Party with his new avatar. That will give you 938 total from the eight of us, so at 20% you’ll get 187 extra levels. That will give you 689 against Cain’s 690. Since you’re a more competent fighter, it’s game over. Easy peasy.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Glad you think it’s going to be so easy for me. Personally, I see that as far too close to call.”

“Hey, I’m all for positive reinforcement,” Gabriel said brightly. “Speaking of which, now we’ve cleared the air a bit, there’s someone here would really like to have a chat with you.”

“Fuck off, Sam,” Dean snarled. “And don’t even think about doing the eye thing because I have just one word for you… Garth.” Dean waited for the point to sink in, then turned on his heel and left the dungeon.

“Shit,” Sam muttered miserably. “It can’t end this way, Gabriel. It just can’t. This is going to break his goddamned heart.”

“I know,” Gabriel agreed. “But I can’t even try to think about that right now. I’m more worried about Dean fighting Cain.”

“Why? Like you said, there’s only going to be one point between them. Dean wins, Cain bites the bullet, Amara’s codes get reset. We all go home. Easy peasy.”

“Damn, you really don’t know your brother at all, do you?” Gabriel sighed.


	82. The Witching Hour

“It’s creepy as fuck,” Dean said, side-eyeing the frozen appearance of the avatar with its dark, unblinking eyes. “Looks like a cross between a manikin and a zombie.”

“Balthazar left the system interface in hibernation mode,” Gabriel explained. “It didn’t seem fair to leave the original coding actively aware after the copy was created and removed. Besides, we all felt it would be easier for you to… um… _deactivate_ this avatar if it was no longer interactive.”

“Appreciated,” Dean agreed fervently. “But that blank stare still creeps me out.” Then he turned his attention to the _other_ Crowley in the room. “I thought you were supposed to be ‘trading up’.”

“I didn’t expect you to display any appreciation of good grooming,” Crowley sniffed. “But surely even a Neanderthal like you should still recognize a perfectly tailored suit when you see it.”

“I wasn’t talking about your suit,” Dean replied dryly. “I was simply expecting you to pick a more impressive avatar to occupy for your ‘eternity’ as the King of Hell.”

“Don’t tell me, you were hoping for Tim Curry with horns and a tail?” Crowley scoffed.

“Oh, wow, that would be so cool,” Charlie enthused. “The Lord of Darkness.”

“Very sexy,” Penelope agreed. “I loved him in that movie.”

“I preferred him in Rocky Horror myself,” Gabriel said. “My favorite Halloween costume _ever.”_

“Not surprised,” Sam muttered, making a deliberate retching motion at the thought of ‘Emmett’ dressed up as Frank-N-Furter.

“Hah, mock all you like,” Gabriel snorted. “I’m not the one who thought wearing thigh-length leather boots was a good fashion statement in Moondoor.”

“I was thinking more on the lines of more hair, more height and slightly less girth,” Dean told Crowley, rolling his eyes at the others.

“I happen to like the way I look,” Crowley argued, with an offended frown.

“I like the way you look too,” Meg agreed, then ruined it by saying, “though he’s got a point about the hair.”

“Two Crowleys are at least one too many though,” Ash pointed out. “Why are we leaving the _spare_ powered up anyway?”

“In case the wards you’ve set against spying demons fail or Cain has the ability to cast a scrying spell before he enters the city,” Dean explained. “I don’t think he has any mage abilities in his repertoire but let’s not take the chance. If he still registers me as a rank 3, I’m hoping he’ll be arrogant enough to just come marching in by himself. If he realizes I’m level 5 too, he’s more likely to summon as many demons as possible and throw them at us as a distraction.”

“I expect he’s going to arrive with a small army regardless,” Gabriel said, “But I agree he’s likely to waste less SP on going overboard unnecessarily. Keeping your level at three until he commits makes good sense.”

Ash nodded his understanding. “So you’re planning to ‘power-up’ at the last minute?”

“Seems better to play it safe,” Dean agreed. “Besides, I’m not sure whether the First Blade will ramp up the negative effects of the Mark of Cain. I’d rather not take the risk before it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Yeah, let’s try to avoid the whole Evil Twink scenario if we can help it,” Crowley said. “Vibe is bad enough around here already without you going all Chucky on our asses.”

“Can’t you do anything about the lesser demons yourself?” Charlie challenged Crowley. “Or is the ‘King of Hell’ moniker on your profile just a flashy calling card? Because if the King of Hell can’t actually control Hell, it seems to me you’re all mouth and no substance.”

“Do I look like Amara to you?” he sneered. “Don’t try to manipulate me by poking at my personal pride.”

“Because he doesn’t have any,” Meg snickered.

“I believe smiting is now in _my_ repertoire,” he warned her.

Meg just smirked unrepentantly.

“Seriously, though,” Charlie said. “Is there no way for you to override the SP protocols to stop Cain summoning demons at all?”

“Those have been written as fixed game engine rules,” Gabriel replied on Crowley’s behalf. “As long as Cain has sufficient SP to spend, his summons will override any direct orders from Crowley for the demons not to respond to him.”

“What about _indirect _orders?” Dean asked.

“Such as?” Gabriel asked, intrigued.

Dean shrugged. “Dunno. Just thinking maybe the demons could be constrained in some way by Hell setting some overall parameters for demonic summoning. Some form of contract limitations.” He turned to look Crowley in the eye. “You said deals are what you do ‘best’. I was just wondering if you could incorporate something like that into the situation.”

Crowley frowned with thought as he rifled through the information accessible to his new avatar. “Retroactively amending the Summoning protocols would be extremely problematic. It would work going forward for future deals, but probably not at this stage of the current situation. The game engine would just see it, correctly, as an attempt to renege on an established deal.”

“Shame we can’t use the inverted devil’s trap, but we don’t want to keep _Cain_ out. Besides, Dean, Crowley and Meg are demons too,” Charlie mused.

“You’re all onto something though,” Ash said. “What about things like hallowed ground and salt? They both repel _lower ranked_ demons in lore, don’t they? And except for you lot and Cain and Balthazar, the _other_ Balthazar I mean, there aren’t any high ranked demons left.”

“Moondoor was never programmed with that particular Lore,” Gabriel said.

“But couldn’t Crowley add the inability to cross salt into Hell’s protocols as a new fixed limitation?” Ash suggested.

“I believe that could be done,” Gabriel agreed thoughtfully. “Setting a rule that the demons can’t cross salt lines wouldn’t breach the SP summoning protocols but would definitely reduce the effectiveness of any demons put into play.”

“Cain could easily break any salt lines though, to let his demons through,” Penelope pointed out.

“Not if we buried them out of sight,” Jimmy suggested quietly from the corner of the room. After one less than stellar attempt by Jimmy to broker peace, both he and Castiel were currently keeping a cautious distance from Dean who was currently deliberately pretending he couldn’t see them.

“That flies,” Ash agreed. “We don’t have time to try to protect the whole city but we could dig a shallow trench around just this building and bury a line of salt. Might work better that way anyway, since Cain will have already committed to his attack before he realizes there are active defenses in place. I don’t know if salt will stop a hellhound but it should definitely work against the rest of the demons.”

“What about the hallowed ground idea?” Penelope asked. “That sounds easier than digging a trench anyway.”

“It won’t work,” Dean told her. “Amara is the effective deity of Moondoor now and Crowley used a temple dedicated to ‘the darkness’ to try to kill us a couple of weeks ago. It was packed with low-level demons and hellhounds so obviously there’s no conflict between her ‘religion’ and demonic powers.”

“Speaking of spells though,” Sam said. “Is it possible to put a devil’s trap on something like an arrow tip?”

“Why?” Dean asked.

“Because the biggest problem we face with Cain is his ability to jump avatars,” Sam explained. “Even if we manage to get him trapped in here alone with Dean, what’s to stop him just doing what he tried last time? By the time he arrives here, he’ll have given up the idea that I am going to ‘arrive’ in-game. So he won’t want to win the fight in _his_ avatar, he’ll want to get inside Dean’s avatar. So we need some way to trap Cain inside his own vessel.”

“Good point. A bullet would work better than an arrow though,” Ash said. “We’d need a projectile guaranteed to lodge right inside his avatar. Something practically impossible to remove. An arrowhead would be too easy for him to pull out by the shaft. But unless he wants to perform self-surgery in the middle of a fight, he won’t be able to remove a bullet.”

“Bullet? Moondoor has guns?” Sam asked incredulously. “Then why on Earth are you lot all walking around fighting each other with knives and swords?”

“Because swords are fun and guns are bogus,” Charlie sniffed. “Well, except for in instances like this when they cross over into common sense territory.”

“Does anybody here even _have_ a gun?” Sam asked pointedly.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “But I know for a fact that Ellen keeps one behind the bar in the roadhouse.”

“I will go and retrieve it,” Castiel said, stepping out of the door before sprouting his wings, lifting into the air and disappearing towards the horizon like a storm cloud.

“Um… wouldn’t it have been quicker for someone to just port there and back?” Penelope asked.

“He’s just showing off,” Dean muttered gruffly, dropping his eyes to hide the aching pain he was feeling at seeing Castiel’s wings for probably the last time.

“I think it’s more likely he took the opportunity to avoid you for an hour or two,” Jimmy said, in sad rebuke. “It’s me you should be blaming for this, not him.”

“I already told you, I don’t want to talk about it,” Dean said shortly. “I’m gonna go make a start on that trench.” Without waiting for an answer, he followed Castiel out of the door.

“Self-sabotaging Asshole,” Sam muttered to his back.

Jimmy watched Dean leave, his expression dejected. Ash walked up and patted him supportively on the shoulder. “Buck up,” he said. “Dean’s emotions always move at the speed of a freight train. He’s already on stage four. He’ll get to five soon enough. Bit of manual labor is probably the best thing to distract him in the meantime.”

“I don’t understand your comment,” Jimmy admitted.

“The five stages of grief,” Charlie said, moving to join them. “Dean has already powered through denial, anger, and bargaining. He’ll wallow here in depression for a bit but acceptance is inevitable.”

“He is in mourning?” Jimmy asked, his eye wide with shock. “He perceives Castiel merging with me to be the equivalence of death?”

It was Penelope who replied. “Mourning is a far more complex emotion than that, Jimmy. I don’t think Dean is mourning either you or Castiel. I think he’s mourning the loss of what might have been.”

Jimmy still looked confused.

“A couple of years ago, I was in a relationship with someone I believed was my ‘Mr. Right’,” she told him. “I was planning to marry him. My imagination had already gone as far as the picket fence, 2.4 kids, a dog, and the family station wagon. Then, well, let’s just say it turned out he wasn’t the man he’d pretended to be and so I finished our relationship. It was my choice to do so and I had no regrets at all about my decision. Yet I still _mourned_ for the loss of what might have been. I was so angry, but more at myself than at him. I don’t know Dean very well but I am confident I’m right when I say he isn’t angry with you _or _Castiel. He is angry with himself. And he is grieving for his lost possibilities.”

“I understand why _he _thinks his disability in the material world is an issue,” Jimmy confessed. “But I told him it didn’t matter to me. I even suggested we could continue to use _Moondoor_ together to overcome any physical limitations we face in the other world. But he said that the first thing he intends to do when this is all over is to send his rig to a scrapyard. He says that except for logging back in long enough to drop Gabriel back in his tank, he never intends to enter this or any other virtual world again.”

“Gotta admit I’m probably going to be changing hobbies myself,” Ash agreed fervently. “Whatever happens to Moondoor, the concept of playing video games for _fun_ has gone completely out of the window.”

Charlie elbowed him in the ribs. “You are _so_ missing the point.”

###

“Can I talk to you?”

Jimmy frowned at the ginger cat. The others had gone outside to assist Dean. Jimmy had decided discretion was the best part of valor and had decided not to join them. “I believe you already are.”

“Really getting the hang of sarcastic wit, aren’t you?” Sam sighed, jumping up onto Jimmy’s lap and then turning around a couple of times before deciding on the optimal sprawling position.

“I am endeavoring to learn to communicate with a more natural cadence,” Jimmy answered, inadvertently demonstrating his problem. “It has occurred to me that Castiel’s experience as a human will be severely limited unless I can learn to overcome my own social inadequacies.”

“It will definitely help a listener to identify who is talking if your personalities are more distinct,” Sam allowed.

“Even with the limitations of your current avatar, it is always obvious which of _you_ is speaking simply from your expression or even the way that you walk. Gabriel moves your body in a totally different way. I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you regarding this issue. Your own insight will prove invaluable. For instance, how do you each decide which one of your personalities takes precedence in any given situation?”

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I suppose I was eased into it by the way that Gabe had to take a backseat for the first couple of days. After that, I guess I expected us to be constantly fighting for control like a couple of guys scuffling over one microphone. But, somehow, it’s just easy. Natural. We kind of automatically know which one of us will fill in the pauses between conversations. It’s usually as smooth as a choreographed dance even though we never discuss it beforehand. Weird, I guess, but somehow it works.”

“Yet the situation for you and Gabriel is different, isn’t it? it’s a temporary arrangement necessitated by the current circumstances. When this is all over, you will each go back to your own bodies and both of you will be free once more to continue your previous lives. Perhaps that is why it is easy. Because you know the situation is not permanent, so you make allowances for each other,” Jimmy mused.

“Well, that’s the odd thing,” Sam said. “We’re both kinda comfortable with this arrangement now. Turns out it’s hard to get this close to someone else and just, well, walk away. I don’t buy into all that mystical soulmate crap but you can’t get closer to another person than actually sharing thoughts. Don’t misunderstand me. Both of us are eager to get back into our own bodies, for sure, but I think the ‘walk away’ part is out of the question. At least not right away. I definitely think either I’m going to have to move to Sioux Falls or maybe Gabe will have to relocate to California. At least for a while.”

“You, you wish to pursue a… a relationship together?”

Sam choked. “Um, not in _that_ way,” he said. “I’m not Dean. I’m completely straight. I know, strictly speaking, that Gabe isn’t really ‘male’ but I think Emmett’s form is probably an insurmountable problem for me. I’m not capable of fixating on the personality and ignoring the packaging it comes in. But in a non-sexual way, yeah, I guess so. I’m kind of imagining Gabe and me spending the next few years or so playing the ‘odd couple’. I just can’t imagine just settling down with some girl now, no matter how much I like her, without finding the relationship lacking. How can I possibly fall completely in love with someone when I’ll be constantly missing the connection of actually sharing a mind? So maybe Gabe and I will just spend a while together as, in Charlie’s words, ‘roomies and best buds’, until we reach the point where we irritate each other more than we’ll miss each other. Considering we’re talking about Gabriel, it might not take _that_ long.”

“Obviously, he’s the grumpy Walter Mitty in the relationship,” Gabriel interrupted. “But, yeah, what Sam said. Turns out sharing a litter box brings guys together.”

“Might take hardly any time at all,” Sam spluttered. “Jesus, Gabe. That’s hardly an image _anyone _wants in their head.”

“Have you… um… have you discussed this scenario with Dean?” Jimmy asked carefully.

The cat looked remarkably shifty considering its face was covered with fur. “Um, yeah. A bit.”

“And his reaction to the information?”

“He thinks it’s Stockholm syndrome,” Gabriel announced. “Though he never specified which of us deserved the diagnosis. He thinks we’ll change our minds when it actually comes to it.”

“He could be right,” Sam acknowledged. “About us changing our minds, I mean. Who knows? Foxhole decisions rarely stick after a war is over.”

“But was he… angry at the notion?”

“He doesn’t consider it any of his business, as long as _I’m_ happy,” Sam said. “I don’t think he’d even care if Gabe and I decided to stay in the same body instead of just the same apartment. He isn’t _prejudiced _against the idea of merged human/V.I.s, Jimmy. Dean is surprisingly good at adapting his world view to incorporate ideas that lesser men would find inconceivable.”

“So Penelope is correct. He truly _isn’t _angry with us. He isn’t _condemning_ our decision,” Jimmy concluded thoughtfully. “He simply feels as though Castiel and I are abandoning him with this action. Because he refuses to even consider participating in a relationship with us in _our_ world.”

Sam sighed heavily. “Saying Dean has ‘abandonment issues’ would be trite. But there’s no escaping the fact that he’s well experienced in being ‘left behind’. The fact most of those ‘abandonments’ have been self-fulfilling prophecies doesn’t change the amount of hurt he’s experienced. I think his reaction to the decision you and Cas have made is just an echo of when he went off with our Dad to make sure Mom and I were safe. Dean has a history of shooting himself in the foot. Of making decisions for the benefit of those he loves at the expense of his own happiness. Still, I’ve got to admit, I’m surprised you’re interested anyway,” Sam said. “I had the impression your religion frowns upon same-sex relationships. Or does Dean’s paralysis solve that dilemma for you?”

“You believe my acceptance of Dean’s disability is because I actively welcome the idea of pursuing a non-sexual relationship due to my Catholic upbringing?”

“Not that I want to overthink it, considering this concerns you and my _brother,_ but yeah. The thought had crossed my mind.”

Jimmy considered that, wondering whether he should feel insulted, then sighed and nodded his acceptance of Sam’s concern. “It’s a reasonable question. I believe it is, however, invalid. It is fair to say that even if I had _truly_ believed in the catholic dogma when I first was seeded with Castiel, my experiences over the last few weeks have forced me to _also_ incorporate new ideas that were formally inconceivable.”

Sam nodded. “I can see that,” he agreed. “Hard to incorporate the reality of Moondoor into a preconceived narrow religious framework.”

“I believe most formal religions will have no choice except to publicly decry the virtual intelligences as abominations. Craven images perhaps. Accepting them as ‘people’ effectively makes their creator, Richard Roman some form of God from a theological standpoint. Which will be seen as heresy. At best, the V.I.’s might be perceived as golems by religions that allow for such things.”

“Better golems than dybbuk,” Sam pointed out. “A golem isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

“I still believe the primary reaction of _most_ humans, religious or not, will be to perceive them as analogous to ‘body-snatching aliens’.”

“Which is why you have agreed to be reseeded,” Sam suggested. “To become living proof of the V.I.s as a force for good not evil.”

“No,” Jimmy admitted. “That is primarily why _Castiel _has agreed to give up his avatar and re-join my body. Like Dean, he is driven to acts of self-sacrifice for the greater good. Personally, my motives are less altruistic. In all honesty, I think I’m just not ready to die. I _was. _I was fully prepared for it before Chuck manufactured this situation. But the thing about hope is it’s insidious. Once I finally accepted the fact that Castiel really _was_ curing me, I learned hope. When Chuck tore that cure away from me, I accepted my mortality once more. I had to. I had no choice. I re-entered this game fully expecting to die here. Then Castiel offered me hope _again_ and, well, this time I must admit I didn’t even argue that hard. It seems my ability to accept an inevitable death decreases with each fresh offer of a possible reprieve.”

“That’s perfectly natural, yet you sound as though you feel guilty about it.”

“I do,” Jimmy agreed. “Although, realistically, since Castiel remaining in Moondoor would have led to Dean choosing to ‘die’ in our world and become a digital character, I think I am pleased the option has been removed from him. So, you see, I am being selfish and hypocritical. I say that I accept Castiel as an equal and yet I see Dean’s choice to become a digital being to be little more than suicide.”

“I don’t know that I agree with you,” Sam said. “If he’d killed Bela Talbot, then I believe slow suicide would have been a perfect descriptor but if it was a choice made freely, out of love, then not so much. I definitely don’t see Crowley’s decision as suicide. Quite the opposite. But I guess I’m selfish and hypocritical too, because I’m equally glad the option is off the table for Dean since, either way, I would have had to bury my brother. I just wish there was a way for Dean to be healed. It’s so damned unfair, isn’t it? The one person forced to take responsibility for this whole shitshow is the only person none of the V.I.s have the ability to cure.”

“Amara is capable of curing Dean,” Jimmy pointed out carefully. “She is vastly more powerful than a standard V.I. I am not referring to her ‘power level’ but to the complexity of her coding. Repairing even as dramatic an injury as I understand Dean’s to be would be possible for any of the major A.I.s. Although I genuinely believe Chuck’s original intention was to kill Dean, it is rather peculiarly convenient that the manner of his injury made him ideally suited for Chuck’s purposes but not for Cain’s. Chuck knew that even if Cain became aware of his presence in Moondoor at this time, he would be reluctant to use Dean as a host because Cain might be capable of animating Dean’s body and _making _it walk but he can’t actually repair it. I believe his experience in Richard Roman’s body has left him loathe to accept a less than fully functioning host body unless faced with no other option. Amara, however, is as capable as Chuck of _genuinely_ healing Dean.”

Sam shook his head sadly. “It’s too late for that. Loki was specifically preparing Dean for Chuck. The only person now able to host Amara’s particular polarity without suffering permanent damage is Charlie. That was a deliberate choice by the Reaper too, I suspect. There’s no way the Reaper would have risked Amara having the opportunity to do a Cain and stay permanently in Dean’s body. I think it’s perfectly obvious to all of us that Amara is not a genuine ally. It suits her more to cooperate with us than to fight Cain herself, but she definitely can’t be trusted not to act in her own self-interest once Cain has been dealt with.”

“The claim both you and Dean have upon the ownership of RRE certainly means accepting Amara’s assistance would be highly problematic,” Jimmy agreed. “Yet only she and the Reaper still have the ability to help Dean and, I know from my own experience, the Reaper’s price for assistance is always completely unreasonable.”

“I’m pissed at the Reaper. Considering Dean’s paralysis was caused by Chuck, you’d think the Reaper would offer him a freebie,” Sam snarled.

“The Reaper made it perfectly clear to _me_ that his terms of business are always non-negotiable,” Jimmy confirmed sadly. “He won’t even ‘cure’ Mortimer Blake’s appearance. I questioned him on that, because, although he’s been keeping Mr. Blake alive for years, he’s never actually done anything to make the man look less like a walking corpse. When he offered to heal _me_, I told him spending eternity not only hosting his avatar but also continuing to look like a walking skeleton was not _my _idea of a viable solution.”

“The Archivist does look like unfortunately like a walking zombie,” Sam agreed. “Nice guy, but very creepy.”

“The Reaper told me, and I quote, ‘Mortimer failed to negotiate that particular aspect when agreeing to our original arrangement’.”

“WHAT? But I thought the Reaper _genuinely_ cares for Mr. Blake.”

“I think he _does,” _Jimmy agreed. “But The Reaper is not _human._ He’s not even similar to Moondoor’s V.I.s. He’s a different breed entirely. Although he is a fantastical creature that is far more than the sum of his programming, I believe at a fundamental level he is still rigidly controlled by the limitations of that programming. He entered into what he considers to be a fixed ‘contract’ with Mr. Blake. The terms of which are binding on both sides. I think he regrets his original terms but, well, an amendment would require a new ‘deal’ and Mr Blake has no further value to offer in exchange. Without adequate ‘consideration’, a further deal is not possible.”

“That’s completely bogus,” Sam snarled. “Because I know from my own experience that the Reaper never bothers to fully itemize the details of the offer he’s making. How can he hold a contract to be firm without both parties understanding what they are agreeing to?”

“I don’t believe the Reaper was programmed with the principles of Tort Law. He’s more likely to apply caveat emptor than the idea of consent requiring understanding between both parties.”

“Buyer beware. Yeah. I can see the fucker living by _that_ principle,” Sam cursed. “It’s no wonder he got Bobby to snatch his server and take him into hiding because the first thing I would probably do on getting out of here is to pull his plug forever. I wonder where he is now.”

“I imagine he’s uploaded himself out of the server and hidden himself within cyberspace,” Jimmy replied. “He’s unlikely to allow himself to be trapped again in a single, non-networked, and therefore vulnerable, physical location. I believe all of the V.I.s have the ability to travel effortlessly through electronic conduits and would make use of that ability should humans turn upon them and actively attempt to shut Moondoor down. It is another reason why public acceptance is so crucial. The only _real_ way to manage any ‘threat’ from the digital beings is to allow Moondoor to continue to be their _preferred_ residence. If the V.I.’s flee into cyberspace, the only way to destroy them completely would be to destroy the entire Internet. Given the way our society has become totally reliant on cyber communications; humanity would be virtually thrown back into the dark ages.”

“Damn. I’d completely failed to think the situation through that far,” Sam confessed.

“Well, you’ve had a lot of other things on your mind lately. Once I was thrown out of Moondoor, I had nothing to do _except_ thinking it all through to its logical conclusion. I don’t know if _anyone_ has really considered just how potentially dangerous these digital people are. My concern is how human beings historically have proven themselves incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Reacting to an immediate threat with such violence that the results are catastrophic _because_ of their violent reaction. The V.I.’s are potentially the most wonderful, valuable allies that humanity will ever be offered. They are also the most terrible threat that humanity has ever faced. I want to believe that people will embrace the hope that they offer. I worry that they will not. This could all end very badly.”

“And so you and Castiel intend to become Moondoor’s ambassador to humanity,” Sam concluded. “You hope to become a bridge of understanding.”

“Initially,” Jimmy agreed. “We both hope it isn’t the lifetime commitment that Dean fears. As more people choose to be hosted and cured, our hope is that interest will soon move away from us. I believe we started this conversation with your own acknowledgment of how you yourself have reached an unexpected accommodation with Gabriel. With every example of a human and a V.I. forming a truly symbiotic relationship, our own situation will become less newsworthy. We will be the first, but far from the only.”

###

“I don’t think there’s anything more we can do to prepare,” Charlie said, tiredly, as they all gathered to eat together on Thursday evening. “Ball’s in Cain’s court now.”

The team had dug two trenches that afternoon. One directly around the central building and a concentric one set several yards further back. The second trench was more of an arc than a circle and currently had a wide gap where the main road into the city led towards the center. Penelope, who had proved to be an unexpected natural MacGyver, had created a fat tube out of hessian sacking material from the City’s grain store, and had filled it with salt. A rope, attached to the tube, had been buried out of sight in the dirt that formed the roadway and attached to a pulley.

As soon as the demons passed over the rope, Benny would be waiting in place to yank the snake of salt into place to prevent the demons from retreating. If it worked, any demons accompanying Cain would be then trapped within a ‘killing field’ between the two salt lines. Hopefully, Cain would cross the inner salt-line without difficulty and would enter the central building without realizing the demons couldn’t accompany him. Then, whilst he and Dean duked it out, the rest of the team could concentrate on banishing the trapped demons back to either Hell or Purgatory.

Ash had lain a series of magical sigils in and around the central building and the surrounding streets. They should, he assured them, create a web of illumination to reveal the presence of any Hellhounds. Since the primary danger of the Hounds was their ability to attack unseen as a pack, but they were individually insufficiently high level to be otherwise dangerous to any of the team members, making them visible _should_ be sufficient defence against them.

Just in case, though, Castiel, after returning from the Roadhouse with Ellen’s gun, had used his ability to fly to rig a series of platforms and ledges on the buildings that sat parallel to the road, all placed at a height just slightly too high for the Hellhounds to leap onto, that formed a ‘rat run’ back towards the perimeter of the city. If the Hellhounds proved too problematic after all, Sam would flee away from the Central building along the route and hopefully draw the Hounds into chasing him right out of the City Gates.

If that happened, Castiel would slam the gates shut, locking the Hounds outside, and he would then sweep Sam up out of danger and fly him back into the City.

Ash and Charlie had painstakingly carved minuscule devil’s traps onto the six bullets that Ellen had provided with her gun.

Crowley had volunteered to be the one who would shoot Cain on his approach to the Central Building. Firstly, he was the only one of the Team who admitted experienced proficiency with a gun. Secondly, he was now effectively ‘immortal’. If Cain ‘killed’ him in retribution for his attack, he would simply be sent back to Hell. The only downside of Crowley’s possible ‘death’ in that scenario was that it would strip 38 levels from the War Party total for the duration of the fight.

That alone would have possibly caused them to rethink the whole scenario except for Dean, who had been sitting with a frown of concentration as he considered the numbers, realizing that Ash, for all of his careful note-taking, had completely failed to add the additional potential of Dumah’s levels to the total he’d offered earlier. Team Free Will now had a total of _ten_ members, not nine. Dumah, as an Angel, also had 20% of 191 levels to offer the War Party. Dean was entering the fight with access to 727 potential levels, not 689. So even if they lost Crowley, Dean would still be left with the amount of power he’d originally expected to be fighting with.

“You going to be okay with fighting Cain?” Ash asked him, quietly. “I know the fact he’s wearing Sam’s face has got to be creeping you out.”

Dean offered a half-shrug. “I was okay last time. He psyched me out, managed to distract me, but it wasn’t the way he looked that did it as much as what he said to me. It was weird as fuck to get used to looking at that damned cat and seeing my brother looking back at me but, in a weird way, it’s done me a favor. It’s helped me adjust to the idea that nobody here is really how they look. I’m not saying it’s still not going to be hard to put a knife into Cain whilst he looks like Sam but I _can _separate reality from perception. I have to, don’t I? It might be the only way everyone will make it out alive.

“Speaking of which, do me a favor and log out, Ash. See if you can find out the latest news about what’s going on with RRE. See if you can get a timeframe for when the FBI will be able to get inside the company to run Charlie’s fix.”

“The fix that won’t be necessary if you kick Cain’s ass tomorrow?” Ash said pointedly.

“Indulge me. Knowing everything _doesn’t _depend entirely on me might make the whole thing easier to handle.”

Ash thought about that, then nodded. “Yeah, I can see that,” he agreed. “It’s a heavy weight to carry into that fight.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Look, it’s none of my business so feel free to tell me to butt out, but I really think you should talk to Castiel tonight. Might be your last chance and I think you’ll regret it later if you don’t at least say goodbye to him.”

Dean scuffed the floor with one toe. “I know,” he admitted. “I just worry I’ll end up begging him not to go through with it. But then I’d hate myself if he listened to me, because of what that would mean for Jimmy. The whole thing sucks.”

Ash hesitated before saying, “You sound resigned now, rather than angry.”

“Yeah, well, I was being a selfish asshole, wasn’t I?”

“You were being human,” Ash replied gently. “Happens to the best of us, sometimes.”

Dean snorted.

“Talk to Cas,” Ash said. “You know you want to.” Then he shrugged. “And that’s all I’m gonna say on the matter. I’ll log out now. See if I can get hold of Bobby or Hotch. Catch you on the flip side.”

###

Hades City was unusually quiet and deserted.

Having made the decision not to return to the material world, Crowley had offered no resistance to Penelope’s suggestion of closing ‘Hell’ down to human customers. The last thing any of them needed was a bunch of human players wandering around partaking in the brothel’s more usual activities whilst an actual battle took place within the city walls.

Dean had agreed and approved of the decision but still felt disconcerted by the empty streets and dark unlit buildings. Crowley had even dismissed all of the NPC characters from the city. The lowest level NPC’s had just dissolved back into the metadata, to be reborn into other characters elsewhere in Moondoor. The more developed ones had literally packed bags, accepted pay in lieu of notice, and had left in a procession to find new homes and occupations in other cities. It had looked oddly like the migration of war-displaced asylum seekers as the NPC’s had left the city en mass in search of new, safer homes.

Crowley’s only comment about their departure had been that it was a shame he couldn’t transport his ‘best’ workers over to the _real_ Hell.

He’d been cheered up considerably by Gabriel’s willingness to spend much of the evening ‘copy and pasting’ vast swathes of coding from Hell to _Hell, _to recreate Crowley’s favorite dungeons there. It appeared that the lower demons would soon be introduced to a lot of the less savory parts of human imagination. Dean had wondered whether he ought to object, on quasi-moral grounds, but Meg seemed totally thrilled at the prospect and so he decided she was a better judge of Demonic needs and wants than he was.

There was something a little hinky going on between Meg and Sam though.

Dean couldn’t put his finger on _that_ relationship. Dean hadn’t missed the fact that Meg had risked her own life to save Sam during the battle with Abbadon. It was a large reason for his support of Crowley’s decision to stay in Moondoor and help her to run Hell. Demon or not, Meg damned well deserved a ‘happy ending’ in Dean’s opinion.

Meg and Crowley seemed to have firmly established themselves as a permanent couple. Meg fully intended to be Crowley’s ‘Queen’. Sam and Gabriel had also become some kind of weird ‘couple’, despite Sam’s insistence the relationship was, and would remain, platonic. 

Yet all the time that Gabriel was assisting Crowley, it was obviously _Sam_ who was sitting curled around Meg’s shoulders like a fur stole and Sam whom the demon was stroking with a fondness that spoke of some underlying connection between the two.

It was weird how, even in the body of a tiny ginger cat, Dean could clearly see the two personalities in constant, simultaneous action. Gabriel speaking even as Sam purred with pleasure. Was his perception unique or would _anyone_ be able to learn to see a blended human/V.I. with such clarity?

He couldn’t help but wonder if that was how he would see ‘Jimiel’ in the material world. Would it be possible to kiss Jimmy’s mouth and yet simultaneously feel Castiel shiver with pleasure under his fingertips?

Dean shuddered, forcing himself to cut that chain of thought off completely.

It didn’t matter.

It wouldn’t be happening anyway.

And yet his idle wandering through the deserted streets had still unerringly led him to where Castiel was standing, staring up into the clear, moonlit sky; his iridescent wings draped behind him like a soft, dark cape.

“I hoped we might speak,” Castiel said, though he remained as still as a statue, not even turning his head to acknowledge Dean’s presence.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said, moving to stand next to him although he, too, made no attempt to actually look at the Angel. They both just stood there, side by side, staring up at the stars.

“As am I,” Castiel agreed.

“You’re… you’re doing the right thing,” Dean finally said. “I know that. I’m just being an asshole.”

“You are,” Castiel said, his voice a low rumble of fond annoyance.

“Yeah, well, sue me,” Dean muttered, kicking at the dirt beneath his feet, his cheeks flushing hotly.

“Your decision is irrational. If I remain here in Moondoor, our relationship will never develop in _that_ way either,” Castiel pointed out. “I cannot even truly conceive of the issue you believe is so insurmountable. I understand your argument _intellectually. _But I truly do not understand.”

“I know. But you _will,” _Dean replied. “And I want that for you. I want it for Jimmy too. I want both of you to experience a full and complete life together. I would only be a yoke around your necks, holding you back.”

“And if that is a burden both of us are more than willing to bear?” Castiel challenged.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not one that _I _can bear,” Dean said firmly. He stared into the gloomy darkness, the shadows oppressive. “Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world; now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day, Would quake to look on.”

Castiel turned to look at him questioningly. Despite the midnight darkness casting everything into monochrome, his eyes were still a vibrant, breathtaking azure blue as though the color blazed from some internal bioluminescence.

“William Shakespeare,” Dean explained.

“Hamlet,” Castiel agreed. “Those words are within the memories I retain from my prior occupation of Jimmy. I was wondering, merely, why you felt the urge to quote them to me.”

Dean shrugged self-depreciatingly. “I don’t know what it is about midnight. It always feels to me like its own kind of virtual world. It somehow makes it possible for me to consider things that are impossible to even _think_ in daylight.”

“Such as?” Castiel asked softly.

“That I almost regret that Loki and I haven’t shared _that_ kind of relationship,” Dean admitted. “I’m going to miss him, I think, but it’s not the same as you and Jimmy, or Sam and Gabriel. Loki’s been more like a friend talking to me now and then via a Bluetooth headset. Like my ‘phone-a-friend’ guy. Not the same kind of relationship at all. I think that’s why I’m struggling to really empathize with how it feels to be ‘blended’ with a V.I. I can’t really get my head around the concept. Sam says it’s almost like finding a ‘soulmate’, but he’s a big emo girl sometimes so maybe he’s just being over-dramatic.”

“I was… resentful… when I first found myself seeded within Jimmy,” Castiel admitted. “I was obedient, prepared to do my duty, but not… pleased. I felt trapped. Claustrophobic, perhaps. A human body seemed to be an impossibly restrictive and unwelcome prison. Weak. Inefficient. And a human existence seemed so ephemeral to me. So… pointless. I confess my first impressions of Jimmy, and of _you_, were that you were vastly lesser beings.”

“I can see why that would be your impression,” Dean admitted wryly. “I’m well acquainted with feeling ‘trapped’ inside my_ own_ body.”

“My perception changed, however,” Castiel continued. “Even before fate gifted me with my ‘own’ body. In the short time I resided within Jimmy I experienced wonders.”

“Wonders?”

“They were to me,” Castiel said, with a shrug. “The shape and smell of a true flower. The feel of bark against ‘my’ fingertips. Pain, even. Odd that such a memory, that of physical _pain,_ should be one of the sensations that I miss. Yet I do. Perhaps that is the real value of an ephemeral existence. That every moment, every sensation, has a vibrancy that my own world lacks. Every moment of ‘real’ life is an improbable wonder. So, for a short while, perhaps forty or fifty years, I will enjoy experiencing that vibrancy. The temporary loss of my own autonomy seems little enough price to pay for the knowledge I will gain, the experiences I will feel. This merging with Jimmy is not a boon that I grant him. It is a gift that his situation offers to _me_.”

“Yeah, that’s where I struggle,” Dean admitted, with a sad chuckle. “That you can think of forty or fifty years as a ‘temporary’ vacation, when to me it’s a lifetime.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Castiel replied quietly. “If Moondoor survives, then the concept of ‘lifetimes’ will no longer be valid for anyone. If you will accept nothing else from me, will you accept this? That I promise when Jimmy no longer has a need for me, I will return to Moondoor and, if you still want me, we can reunite here.”

“That’s a nice idea,” Dean agreed, with a sad smile. “Our very own ‘An Affair To Remember’ movie ending, huh? We’ll meet again in fifty years, rather than six months but, hey, who’s counting? Sounds like a plan.”

Castiel nodded, though they both knew Dean didn’t mean it.

“Just need to get through tomorrow first though,” Dean said, squaring his shoulders as though physically shoving away the intimacy of their previous conversation. “Weird to think, one way or another, that by this time tomorrow it will be over. Good job I signed a contract to receive a minimum of one year’s salary, huh?”

“I believe your financial position will be healthy regardless. You are co-owner of RRE, are you not?”

Dean shook his head. “Nah, I think I’ll leave all that bullcrap to Sammy. It’s more his kind of gig anyway. I can’t see me wheeling myself into a damned board meeting with a bunch of suits. As long as I get my salary paid up, I’ll have enough money to buy some kind of adapted vehicle. I fancy a road trip. See a bit of America, maybe. Who knows? Maybe I can talk Ash into coming with me.”

“I have the distinct impression you could talk Ash into _anything,”_ Castiel replied, a little testily.

Dean patted him on the shoulder. Absolutely _not_ taking the opportunity to run his fingertips over the soft feathers of Castiel’s wings. “You sound jealous, Cas,” he quipped, his face set in a careless smile. Only his eyes remaining dark with personal anguish.

“I fail to understand why a platonic friendship with Ashriel is acceptable to you, whilst a platonic relationship with _me_ is not,” the Angel complained.

Dean shrugged. “Well, don’t repeat this to Ash,” he said, his voice lowered into a conspiratorial whisper. “But it’s mainly because I don’t want to jump _his_ bones.”

Castiel blinked in confusion, clearly unable to interpret the meaning of ‘bone jumping’.

Dean smiled wryly again.

“We’ve both gotta get some rest. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow. Sleep well, Angel.”

Then he turned, without waiting for a reply, and walked away.


	83. End Game

“Okay, we’ve got a serious problem, boys and girls,” Crowley announced the next morning, shortly after they’d eaten breakfast. “Over three thousand demons and five dozen Hellhounds were just summoned out of hell. One guess who summoned them.”

“Three _thousand_ demons?” Charlie screeched. “How the fuck did Cain get enough SP to summon that many?”

“We probably don’t want to know,” Penelope said, with a shudder of distaste.

“Our defenses won’t hold for long against an army that large,” Jimmy said, his expression grim.

“They won’t need to hold for long though. They just need to delay shit. The more demons Cain has summoned, the faster his SP will drain, so the less time he’ll be able to keep hold of all of them. I think this is good news, all things considered. He obviously isn’t expecting any organized resistance and he definitely isn’t anticipating Dean to be Rank 5,” Gabriel pointed out. “I think he’s just throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us, to presumably intimidate the rest of the team into just giving up without a fight and letting him have free access to Dean.”

“That would sound far more convincing if you didn’t currently look like a hedgehog on speed,” Dean pointed out dryly.

“Okay,” Gabriel grumbled, willing his fur to flatten again. “So, I admit, I’m a _bit_ worried.”

“They’re going to charge into this City like a rampaging Viking Horde, doing the whole rape, pillage and burn shtick. We’ll be lucky if it takes them more than ten minutes to overwhelm us completely,” Ash said.

“Can’t you summon some demons of your own to help?” Penelope asked Dean, hopefully.

“Couple of hundred level fives at best,” Dean admitted. “I just don’t have the SP. I spent all my time trying to build up that fucking useless FP instead, didn’t I?” Then he paused, frowning as he thought furiously. “Hang on. It _can’t_ be totally useless. Currency _has_ to be spendable in-game. It’s a fixed game engine rule, isn’t it?”

“The FP was designed specifically to give you the ability to pray for _my_ help. When I became autonomous, the currency became irrelevant,” Castiel replied dolefully.

“Nah,” Dean said. “Well, yes, you’re right of course but still, nah. _Earned _inventory items don’t work that way. Humans would never play any digital game if only the top-ranked players had the ability to spend prizes. The whole principle of gaming is that, sure, there are the guys rich enough to just buy themselves top positioning but there are also guys who grind their way through and with graft, and luck, they can drag themselves up by the bootstraps with minimal financial investment just by winning the odd prize here and there. So every winnable item of value in-game has to be usable by both top-level players and lower-level enthusiastic amateurs. I know the actual intended _purpose_ of the FP but, dunno, my gut tells me the game engine wouldn’t have permitted it to be programmed into the game at all unless it also complied with standard game principles.”

“Damn,” Charlie breathed. “You’re absolutely right. How the hell did I miss that? It’s so obvious now you’ve said it. There has to be some _other_ way for you to use the FP you’ve earned.”

“My instincts have been telling me to keep my FP levels rising, even after Castiel stopped needing me to spend them for his assistance. I assumed it was just a ‘righteous’ thing but now I’m not so sure,” Dean said. “There’s something that’s been niggling at the back of my mind that insists they have some specific value by themselves.”

“You definitely can’t directly summon any other Angels with them,” Gabriel said. “I know that’s a fixed rule because you can only pray to Castiel. The rules had to be written that way, otherwise you’d have had the ability to influence the V.I.s inside the other Knights.”

Dean chewed his lower lip for a moment. “Okay. So when you say other Angels, you only mean other Seraphim or Archangels, right? They are the only ranks capable of seeding a player? So, is it possible the rule was written with only _those_ ranks specifically named?”

The cat’s eyes narrowed. “Where are you going with this?”

“He’s talking about hierarchies,” Jimmy suggested. “I think so, anyway. Maybe it’s possible to use the FP to summon assistance from the lower choirs.”

Dean shrugged awkwardly. “What he said,” he agreed.

“Not directly, because of the prayer-thing. But via Castiel, perhaps,” Gabriel agreed thoughtfully. “You can only _pray_ to Castiel, but perhaps, with sufficient FP to work with, _he_ can request assistance from a choir of lesser angels. Perhaps Castiel can act as the heavenly equivalent of a Meg and orchestrate a team of warrior angels to assist.”

“_Powers_ you mean?” Jimmy queried doubtfully. “Can a Seraph even control them?” he asked. “Because I agree that’s the type of Choir we really need, but my understanding is that Seraphim are in a totally different Hierarchy than Powers.”

“What the fuck are Powers?” Dean demanded.

“The warrior class of Angel,” Jimmy explained. “In a situation like this, I think only Powers and Virtues would be of help. Virtues are angels with power over elemental forces. Which might be particularly useful abilities if the demons are literally planning to burn the city. The problem is, neither of those types of angels are in the same hierarchy as Castiel.”

“You’re overthinking this, Jimmy. I don’t think Richard Roman was a Catholic,” Gabriel chuckled. “The Angel Hierarchy here is pretty straightforward. We don’t even have 9 orders, let alone have them broken into three hierarchies. Angels like Castiel simply level up from Basic Angel to Thrones, then to Virtues; to Powers; to Principalities; and finally to Seraphim. We don’t even have Cherubim or Dominions in-game. And Archangels like me are ‘born’ not made. We don’t have to level up at all. We just automatically sit on the top of the Hierarchy.”

“Well, yes,” Jimmy agreed. “A single Hierarchy definitely simplifies things considerably.”

Castiel pondered their comments. “So, theoretically, I would have access to the assistance of all lower ranks as long as Dean can provide me with enough FP with which to _hire_ them?”

“Dunno,” Gabriel admitted. “But the idea has legs. Worth a shot. It’s not like we’ve got anything to lose. Better get praying, Dean.”

“Is there any way we can fudge Crowley’s level to appear higher?” Penelope asked, as Dean wandered off with Castiel to find somewhere quieter to ‘pray’. “Since Crowley is intending to show himself before Cain even reaches Dean, it would be really helpful if he could still appear to be ‘in-play’ but his level 190 will be a bit of an obvious giveaway if Cain thinks to check his profile.”

“I can’t make him read as a level 200,” Ash said. “But I could cast a spell to obscure his profile completely. Cain will probably just then _assume_ he’s still 200 and that there’s just some kind of glitch with his avatar. I mean, how would it even occur to him that Crowley has moved from being a demonic boss into being _the _demonic boss? Just the fact he’s still alive at all should automatically convince him Dean hasn’t leveled up yet. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

“It will still be a problem if he actually _kills_ Crowley,” Charlie pointed out glumly.

“Well, obviously,” Crowley said, rolling his eyes, “because that shit still hurts even if it doesn’t stick.”

“I actually meant Cain would realize you aren’t a _real_ demonic boss if he kills you but fails to then gain your ranks.”

“Well, despite your touching lack of concern for my health and wellbeing, again we’re back to not letting him kill me,” Crowley drawled. “I’ve got to say I don’t really have an issue with that plan.”

“Ports,” Ash said, with a decisive nod. “We need to pre-program an auto-port for your avatar. If Cain manages to hit you with his blade or even look like he _might_, you need to instantly port away to Hell. I could alter the spell obscuring your profile to flash something like _Hellport_ so Cain knows exactly where you’ve gone.”

“Yeah. Let’s not just get me almost killed but then let’s also helpfully give the big bad my cords so he can follow me home to finish the job,” Crowley drawled sarcastically.

“The point is he _won’t,” _Ash said. “If he’s confident he knows where you’ve gone, he’ll decide to come back for you _after_ he’s dealt with Dean. He’ll put you out of his mind and concentrate on going after the main prize. Now he’s run out of time for Sam to ‘join the game’, he wants to get hold of Dean’s avatar far more urgently than he wants _your_ ranks.”

“Makes sense,” Meg agreed. “He’ll reason that once he’s in Dean he’ll be Rank 8 anyway, so he’ll think Crowley will be far easier to just mop up later.”

“Cain won’t be _able_ to seed Dean after I shoot him,” Crowley pointed out. “He’ll be trapped in his own avatar.”

“_My_ avatar,” Sam muttered.

Meg rolled her eyes at both of them. “But he won’t _know_ that. The devil’s trap might sting a bit going in but he’ll just assume that’s how it feels to be shot anyway and since it won’t hurt enough to halt him, he’ll assume the whole thing was a failed attempt to _kill_ him. The bullet won’t reveal its _actual_ purpose until Cain tries to either leave his own avatar or use a port.”

“You _sure_ about that?” Charlie queried, biting her lower lip in concern.

“Pinky swear,” Meg said, with a lascivious wink. “I wouldn’t lie to _you,_ Red.”

Charlie didn’t look totally convinced but, since Sam dropped the subject easily enough, they all decided Meg was just deliberately messing with Charlie. After all, Sam seemed to understand Meg better than any of them.

###

Cain was looking forward to returning to the material world if only so he could fire the entire staff of the RRE security division. He couldn’t believe he’d been stuck in Moondoor for almost a full week and those incompetent idiots _still_ hadn’t managed to locate Sam Winchester.

RRE had a copy of the best facial recognition software in the world, a level of invasive technology that would make the Chinese government cream their pants, and that software had the ability to access cameras in every walk of life. Humans would probably be horrified if they knew just how _many_ places their images were captured. It wasn’t just by the obvious cameras, such as CCTV and ATM machines. Image capture was possible from almost all electronic devices. Anything with a screen could be used with the right software. Even a digital television or a smartphone or an electronic cash register could capture a facial image and transmit it back to RRE’s Headquarters.

No matter how careful he was trying to be, it was inconceivable that Sam Winchester could have spent more than a day, let alone a week, without triggering a single sighting.

The situation wasn’t completely calamitous though. Dean Winchester’s physical appearance was at least a particularly aesthetically pleasing one. Cain could imagine a number of advantages of using _that_ face during negotiations. Besides, there was always the option of doing another body-swap when he finally tired of animating yet another sub-par host body. It should be easy for _Dean_ to convince his younger brother to enter an immersion tank at a later date. Perhaps a much later date. The real problem with Sam’s appearance was that, despite his considerable size, he was a little too young to be a suitable host anyway. Let him age to perhaps thirty or so, and it would probably be safe to stay in his body for ten or twenty years without causing undue attention. Looking a mere 24 for two decades would not be so easy to carry off and Cain anticipated needing at least twenty more years to fully implement his plans.

Despite his intent to spend _most _of his time in Moondoor after he was in control of the digital world, Cain still needed the ability to transition easily between both environs until the technology was in place for him to stop worrying about human interference entirely. Having to constantly change his human form in the meantime was an inconvenience he could do without.

So, as he assembled his demonic army around the walls of Hades City, his plan of action was clear.

Dean The Righteous, and his motley crew of interfering idiots, had undoubtedly prepared as best they could for his approach. They would have attempted to lay traps or diversions. They would have chosen a place they considered optimal for the final confrontation. Cain was not going to make the mistake of underestimating Dean Winchester _again_.

Which was why Cain would obviously have much preferred to draw Dean out of the city entirely to fight on _his _terms.

If Dean hadn’t had access to ports, the best way to do that would have been to simply stay outside whilst his demons destroyed Hades City entirely. To raze it to the ground, forcing Dean to flee outside of the gates to meet his fate.

As Dean _did_ have access to realm ports, Cain needed to be smarter. Since he didn’t want to be stuck in-game for another week, he had to get the job over and done with and he _needed_ to end the battle inside Dean’s avatar. So he reasoned the best way to be sure that Dean wasn’t spooked into running was to let the fool think _he_ had the upper hand.

Which was why Cain intended to simply walk right into whatever ‘trap’ Dean had set for him.

Since the stupid idiot apparently didn’t have the stomach to kill Crowley, he was still Rank 3. He didn’t have a First Blade. He didn’t, therefore, understand that Cain wasn’t _just_ 390 levels higher than him but now of a different breed entirely. Cain was the wielder of a First Blade and that meant he could only be _killed_ by a First Blade.

So, really, it didn’t matter what Dean or his little friends were planning.

Cain’s victory was assured because he was now effectively immortal.

And if that begged the question of why he was even bothering to throw an army of demons in Dean’s face at all? Well, it just suited him to do the job with a bit of showmanship and it wasn’t as though he needed the SP anymore. He would burn Hade’s City down to the ground, and rip all of Dean’s associates limb-from-limb, simply because he _could._

He might as well start his take-over of Moondoor as he intended to continue his reign.

Bathed in fire and blood.

###

Looking out over the ramparts of the City, seeing the seething black mass of assembled demons stretching wide almost as far as his eyes could see, Ash swallowed heavily and wondered, not for the first time, whether responding to Dean’s initial request for fake I.D. all those years ago had been the best or worst thing he had ever done.

Did he regret it?

Sometimes.

There was no escaping the truth that _many_ times over the subsequent years he had cursed himself for falling so completely, inescapably, in-love with Dean Winchester. Such an equally rewarding and yet pointless love. Ash found himself trapped within Dean’s orbit like a fly in amber. And not often, but sometimes, he wished he’d never even lain eyes on him.

Was this one of those times?

Ash thought about it, long and hard, as he faced the very real possibility of dying in a damned video game, ripped apart by demons, and thought it definitely _should_ be one of his regrets.

But, even as the army of demons began to move like a tsunami towards the City, Ash shrugged and shook his head.

Nope.

One way or the other, he somehow felt this was a moment that had always somehow been inevitable. This had _always_ been the destination their journey together had been leading them to. And, even knowing that, Ash still didn’t regret the choices that had led him to this juncture.

“Looks like a good day to die,” he muttered, and cast the spell to conceal Castiel and his troops from immediate view.

###

Castiel had ‘troops’.

And even as odd and peculiar as that felt to him, the image of Michael by Guido Reni was foremost in his mind; the picture in Jimmy’s memory that had birthed his actual wings, that assurance that Angels were warriors, were soldiers, were the smiters of evil and champions of the righteous and protectors of the weak.

This was probably why the 892 Powers and 358 Virtues he had manifested from Dean’s FP also were cloaked with wings, although theirs were merely shadow-wings, visual illusions rather than solid winged appendages like his own. And why the Powers who stood with him were clothed in armor and bore swords, whilst the Virtues he had handed over to Dumah to manage were draped in silken robes and carried pitchers of Holy Water in their hands to quench the hellfire the demons were inevitably bringing to their door.

Somehow, he had drawn his brethren to him out of the metadata with the form and function he most required.

It felt vaguely heretical. As though he himself was playing ‘God’.

He thought he should probably feel guilty.

Instead, he felt resolute.

Felt calm and determined.

Felt, at last, as though his own path and purpose were set.

In this, if in no other way, he could be _exactly_ what Dean required of him.

###

Meg settled in place.

The 197 level five demons procured with Dean’s paltry amount of remaining SP hid in the shadows behind her, pressed tightly against the walls of buildings, crouching behind water butts and flowerpots, skulking behind garbage bins or concealing themselves in the overhangs of doorways.

Her demons would wait, staying out of the initial forays at the outskirts of the City, slipping out of hiding only when the first wave of demons broke through the Angelic resistance towards the Central plaza. Then they would dark out of their hiding places and_ join_ the ranks of Cain’s forces from behind. Moving along with them, biding their time, ready to strike the other demons in surprise attacks. A fifth column, sowing death and confusion from within.

###

South of the plaza, Crowley sat alone in a deserted tavern.

On the table in front of him lay a large flagon of single malt and a loaded gun.

He had considered and dismissed the idea of climbing up into the belltower of the plaza. For one thing, it was a handgun, not a rifle. A shot fired from so high might easily miss the target. Besides, Crowley needed to actually reveal himself to Cain. He needed Cain to be cocky and confident. To be absolutely certain that Dean was still a Rank 3 when he stepped inside the Central Building to the final confrontation.

The spell Ash had cast on Crowley to ensure he would activate an automatic emergency port the moment Cain retaliated against his attack felt like a buzzing itch under his skin.

Not necessarily a _comforting_ buzz. More a constant reminder that this sort of self-sacrificial bullshit was most definitely not within his normal comfort zone.

But whilst Crowley’s personal motto was that the best example of self-sacrifice was when your opponent gave_ their_ lives for_ their_ cause, his own long-term survival was certainly going to be better served if Dean won this battle than if Cain did.

He just hoped the port would get him back to Hell _before_ Cain’s dagger was buried in his guts.

###

In the area between the two buried salt-lines, Sam was racing like a dervish, running back and forth across the dusty floor in a blur of golden light. Crisscrossing the yard until the whole area was lit by a glowing grid of intersecting lines that formed a vast ‘net’ of angelic power.

As each new line was added to the huge web, Charlie and Penelope ran to etch a banishing sigil into the ground at either end, magically ‘locking’ it in place. 

When the entire grid was finished, both it and the sigil would fade out of view, waiting to be activated by one final spell that Ash had already carved under the entrance of the Central Building.

It would be the act of Cain stepping into the doorway that would trigger the trap.

Cain would cross the threshold and the entire area between the salt lines, the ‘killing field, would charge with Holy Fire. Any demons trapped within its borders would be immolated and, hopefully, dismissed instantly back to Hell.

It would also burn hot enough to prevent Cain from immediately retreating back the way he had entered.

And, just in case Crowley failed to shoot Cain en route _or_ the devil’s trap didn’t have the expected side effect of preventing him from activating a port as well as trapping Cain inside his host body, Gabriel had duplicated the pocket dimension trick Cain had used within the Roadhouse to temporarily turn the entire Central Building into a port-free zone.

Of course, trapping Cain within the building also meant that Dean _also_ had no way to escape.

So, of the two knights then trapped in the building together, only one would emerge alive.

###

The demons didn’t wait for Cain to blast the city gates open.

Like an army of ants they used their own momentum to swarm up the outer walls, climbing upwards over the bodies of their comrades, surging like a wave of flesh until the topmost demons were high enough to tumble over the ramparts and drop down the thirty feet to the floor below.

Falling so far, they landed heavily, limbs sprawled like spiders, and the Powers, moving within the cloak of invisibility Ash had woven, moved swiftly to despatch them _almost _faster than they dropped. Despite the overwhelming numbers of Cain’s forces, the swords of the warrior angels, flashing mercilessly to decapitate and dismember, might have contained the assault entirely had Cain been unable to unravel the metadata that formed the gate.

But, like Gabriel, Cain was an archangel.

It took him only minutes to dissolve the threads that held the solid metal gate woven together and thereby throw them open with a resounding crash. So then, instead of tumbling down from the top of the walls the demonic horde ceased their attempts to scale the wall and instead powered through the opened entrance en mass.

Another few minutes and Cain had managed to isolate and counter Ash’s spell. The Powers lost the advantage of their invisibility and the demons, now able to see the swords wielded against them, began to successfully fight back.

Despite Cain’s shock at meeting a level of resistance he _definitely_ hadn’t anticipated, he didn’t pause his own progress into the city. Since his demonic forces were more for effect than real purpose he had no interest in how many of them were losing their lives against the angels. It was obvious to him that his own forces had a clear advantage of numbers anyway. Even if he lost _half_ his army to the angels, he would still have more than enough to finish the job he had started.

So he simply swept forward, leaving the battle raging behind him, his eyes firmly fixed on the Central plaza where he knew, without doubt, that his new host body awaited.

###

Dumah directed the Virtues to lay a circle of Holy Water in a thin trail that snaked a circle that roughly approximated the path of the buried salt-line that immediately surrounded the Central Plaza.

Although the Plaza itself formed a sufficient firebreak to prevent the Central Building from easily catching fire, even should the entire rest of the city burn, the risk of the wind bearing burning embers in its direction was still substantial. Plus, the demons caught between the salt-lines would have several moments before the angelic trap activated in which to assault the Central Building with their Hellfire.

If they were successful, the flames wouldn’t only risk Dean’s life, they might drive him out of the building to meet Cain in the Plaza instead of inside the controlled environment of the Hall. That would also prevent them from activating the spell to burn the Plaza. Which, in turn, would also remove their ability to deal with the demons trapped between the salt lines.

So the primary job of Dumah and the Virtues was not to directly engage in combat, unless unavoidable, but to ensure Cain’s demons didn’t manage to reach the killing field with hellfire still in their arsenal. The simple act of crossing the holy water should automatically quench any torches the demons were carrying.

###

Castiel flowed through the combatants, assisting his troops, smiting demon after demon, wincing as he saw Power after Power fall to demonic swords. Although he knew that neither the lesser angels nor the demons were actually _dying, _that they would respawn again like NPC’s rather than suffer the fate of seeded angels, the battle was still distressing to experience. The pained cries of angel and demon alike were an affront to him, even as he added his own fair share of death and destruction onto the masses.

None of this was necessary. All this suffering caused to his brethren, and in truth he counted the demons as _also_ his brethren in this instance, since they, like his own troops, were merely obediently following preprogrammed instructions, had been caused by the greed and hubris of his father as much as the blame lay with Cain.

All of this could have been avoidable.

Yet, despite his anger and despair over the situation itself, his determination to defeat the demons remained resolute.

_Real _lives were at stake here. Those of humans and seeded angels alike. _They _were the ones who mattered now. The people who would not respawn. The people who would truly _die._

And so, he continued to fight, even as his avatar became drenched with blood and gore that failed to dissipate even when the bodies they came from winked out of view as they dissolved back into the metadata.

###

Crowley waited until Cain and those of his demons who had not been killed or delayed by the rest of the Team reached the street that led directly into the Central Plazza before he took one last gulp of whiskey and picked up the gun.

He’d been considering _where _to shoot Cain.

Although he had six bullets, he highly doubted he’d manage to fire more than once before the Rank 5 boss reacted with extreme prejudice. So he probably would only manage one attempt and, if so, that shot had to count.

So a headshot was out. Crowley wasn’t a marksman. Wasn’t a trained sniper with precise aim. Which was probably a shame, really, as even if it was true that a gunshot couldn’t _kill_ Cain, his in-game effectiveness would still be considerably reduced if he became trapped inside an avatar with half of its brains missing.

A gutshot, he decided. The largest target area _and _probably intensely painful to boot.

He was pretty certain, despite his ‘auto-port’ that Cain’s First Blade _would_ fly into his own guts within a second of him firing. All the port would achieve was the removal of his avatar out of Moondoor faster than Cain could follow through with a second strike.

He sighed.

This self-sacrificing bullshit was for the birds, he decided.

So it was only the fact he had a far better brand of whiskey already decanted and waiting for him in Hell that convinced him to step outside into Cain’s path and fire.

###

Dumah was running out of Virtues faster than a drunk nun in a brothel.

The Holy Water had done its job, halting the fire raging from the outlying buildings. It had even had the unexpected side effect of stopping the Hellhounds in their tracks. Perhaps due to the way Crowley had specifically worded the lore additions to Hell’s coding, the damp, dark line of Holy Water over the perimeter of the Plaza was proving to be no actual deterrent to the demons. They were stepping over it without any issue. The only thing it _was _achieving in their case was to extinguish any torches of Hellfire they were carrying.

So, basically, it was doing exactly what they had expected it to do.

The _unexpected_ effect, however, was that the Hellhounds apparently couldn’t cross it.

And that was a problem.

Ash had laid his web of illumination over the Plaza, not the outlying streets. So now, instead of racing through to the place where they would have been rendered visible (and possibly even have been also caught up in the spell to trap and immolate the demons) the charge of the Hellhounds had been halted.

Dumah and the Virtues were trapped with the Hounds preventing them from escaping away to the outskirts of the City and the knowledge that the Plaza was about to turn into a raging inferno at any second prevented their retreat in that direction.

And so with no way to escape, one by one, the Virtues were beginning to fall to the savage attacks of the invisible Hellhounds.

Dumah could only hope she herself would survive long enough for Dean to utilize her contribution to the War Party in time.

###

Dean was unsure whether it was bravado or sheer bloody-mindedness that kept him from doing more than simply approaching the hibernating avatar formerly known as Crowley until he actually heard Cain’s footsteps approaching the outer door.

Though, in retrospect, he wondered whether some part of him had simply wanted to see the look on Cain’s face because he still then waited until Cain was actually inside the room before drawing his own blade.

Cain’s expression of confident triumph changing to confusion as, within a few seconds of the time it took Dean to stab his blade into the avatar’s heart, Dean’s level visibly rose by 200 to 689; as his rank jumped from three to five and Loki cheerfully announced he too had been awarded the First Blade.

Still, the pleasure Dean felt was considerably dampened by the fact Cain’s face was that of Sam. Impossible to take true pleasure in Cain’s dismay when it was Sam’s eyes that were wide and dark with alarm.

‘Head in the game’, he chided himself. Sam’s avatar was just that; an illusion. The beast that lurked under that all-to-familiar skin was Cain.

“How did you do that?” Cain snarled, unconsciously patting his own stomach where a dark spreading blood-stain evidenced he hadn’t simply _imagined_ Crowley’s presence outside just minutes earlier.

“Does it even matter? Dean demanded. “Face it, asshole. You’re not strong enough to kill me. There’s only one level between us now and you’re fighting in an unfamiliar body whereas I’ve had twenty-eight years to become familiar with mine.”

“You’ll be surprised how familiar I’ve become with this body over the last few days,” Cain smirked. “Or perhaps not. After all, even you must have an inkling of how expensive it was to hire an army so large.”

“How did that work out for you?” Dean mocked, circling around Cain, blade in hand. “You seem to have accidentally left all your minions behind you and, oops, is that the smell of burning demon in the air? I think there’s a bit of a barbeque going on in the Plaza even as we speak.”

Cain struck suddenly, with the speed of a cobra, his blade flashing towards Dean’s chest.

Dean parried, knocking Cain’s blade to the side and danced back out of reach. But not without leaving a shallow cut down the length of Cain’s right forearm, bisecting his sigil.

“They served their purpose,” Cain sneered, even though his eyes flared with a little fear. “Because all of your little friends are out there. Nobody can help you. It’s just you and me and it doesn’t matter whether you are a better fighter than me or not, does it? I’m not here to _kill_ you.”

“That’s the thing,” Dean said, moving in to slash at the wound on Cain’s stomach then back-peddling just in time to avoid Cain’s own strike towards his chest. “You jump inside me, Sam’s avatar disappears taking its ranks with it, and you’re stuck as a Rank 5. Then Amara kicks your ass. Not seeing your game plan here, bud.”

“I’m an archangel,” Cain smirked. “Read my profile.”

Dean blinked as he did so. Instead of the expected 690 levels, Cain was displaying 691.

“Fucking goddamnit,” Dean cursed, reluctantly impressed. When Gabriel had insisted Cain would have worked out the way to prevent Sam’s body simply winking out of the game when he exited it, Dean had been doubtful enough to lay a bet on the outcome. He now owed Gabriel $20.

Of course, it was only payable if they both got out of Moondoor. This was why Dean had also agreed with the devil’s trap bullet idea despite personally feeling it would prove unnecessary. Well, that and the fact he’d enjoyed the idea of using Crowley as the sacrificial goat.

So Cain _had_ stuffed some poor unsuspecting level one demon inside his own head to act as a ‘placeholder’ for Sam’s ranks.

Damn. Twenty bucks down the drain.

Still…

“Go for it,” he told Cain, with a cocky smirk. “Take me over, if you think you’re hard enough.”

Cain’s eyes flashed with fury… then clouded with surprise… then darkened with confusion.

“If that’s supposed to look intimidating, I should probably let you know you _actually _just look a bit constipated,” Dean said, with mock concern. “Or in need of Viagra, maybe. Apparently that’s good for performance issues.”

“What have you done?” Cain snarled.

“Oh, wasn’t me,” Dean said, innocently. “Thank Crowley for that one. Devil’s trap on the bullet. See, you were probably thinking he was doing a whole Butch and Sundance, death-by-cop, suicide routine, huh? Shooting you like that, I mean, even knowing confronting you like that would probably cause his instant death. A desperate act, by a desperate man. Well, fact is, he simply outsmarted you. Yeah. I know. Sucks, huh? So, even if, by some bizarre chance, you win this fight with me, which even if I say so myself is highly fucking unlikely, it’s over. This is it. Welcome to Moondoor, your very own ‘forever home’. We could print you a nice bumper sticker. ‘Moondoor is for life, not just for Christmas’.”

Dean ducked and spun as Cain’s blade flew out of his hand towards his head. “Temper, temper,” he said, then dropped into a forward roll to avoid the blade as Cain snapped his wrist and caused the knife to fly back to him in a trajectory that would have impacted Dean’s shoulder if he’d failed to move in time.

He used the momentum of his roll to reach into his inventory and withdraw Lilith’s crude bone dagger with his left hand. Then he sprang to his feet, First Blade in his right hand, his Mark of Cain flaring on his arm, his mouth twisting into an unfamiliarly cruel smirk. “Let’s stop dancing and get this over and done with for good, huh?”

###

Less than ten minutes later, he opened the door, looked out into the scorched earth of the Plaza and grinned at the sight of his blood and gore splattered teammates.

And Crowley.

Who, judging by the fact he was the only one of them _not_ covered in demonic entrails, appeared to have returned from Hell in a freshly minted avatar to join them.

“It’s safe to come in. Maybe an idea to leave your shoes at the door though.”

“Oh, never mind the carpet,” Crowley quipped. “I’ve moved on and upwards now.”

“Well, more _downwards_,” Meg snickered. Unlike Crowley, _she_ was still wearing the evidence of the battle.

“Um, you’re still Rank 5,” Gabriel pointed out, flouncing through the door with his tail waving like a cheerful flag despite the fact his entire fur was almost burgundy with dried blood.

“Yeah, well, about that,” Dean muttered. “Ta, dah!” 

In the middle of the hall, a very _alive_ Cain was sitting with his legs and left arm fastened to a chair with a length of hemp rope.

“You didn’t kill him,” Penelope said, unnecessarily.

“He dropped his blade and surrendered,” Dean said, with a shrug. “What could I do?”

“Perhaps he only dropped his blade because you severed his right arm at the elbow,” Castiel suggested, with an arch of his brow.

“He decided to give up,” Dean said.

“Perhaps only because you had removed his ‘Mark of Cain’, thus making his First Blade useless to him?” Jimmy suggested.

“Same difference,” Dean said. “Still counts as a surrender, even under duress.”

“I don’t think the Geneva Conventions apply in Moondoor,” Crowley grumbled.

“I think the principle that killing an unarmed enemy combatant after they lay down their weapon considerably predates Geneva,” Ash replied. “Dean’s right. It would have been murder to continue after Cain gave up. Regardless of _why_ he gave up_. _ Dean had no choice. Just because the bastard deserves to die doesn’t excuse killing him in those circumstances.”

“Except that not killing him means Dean can’t acquire his ranks, can he?” Charlie sighed.

“Shame about us using the bullet, now,” Sam said. “The whole situation would be a heck of a lot easier if we could force Cain to do a Balthazar and move into a generic demonic avatar.”

“A tiny _helpless _avatar,” Penelope specified grumpily. “Is there such a thing as a demonic rat?”

“I like _that_ idea. Then a few decades on a rack in Hell whilst he levels back up would encourage him to be a nicer person,” Meg suggested.

“I don’t think you’re qualified to be an authority on ‘nice’, bitch,” Cain snarled.

“Shut the fuck up,” Dean snapped, waving his blade, the sigil on his arm glowing with red hot promise. Yet, when Cain complied with a flinch, Dean continued speaking. “I suspect you’re all going to hate me for saying this; but, whatever he’s done, and no matter how much we personally dislike him, Cain here is a victim too. He never asked to be seeded into Richard Roman. He wasn’t responsible for the negative effects the Mark of Cain had on him during the first Knights conflict and he sure as hell didn’t deserve to be stuck in Richard Roman’s corpse for fifteen years. I’m not saying _any_ of that justifies what he’s done. If he _had_ continued to fight me, then I would have killed him without any sense of guilt. But, still, he isn’t an unredeemable evil cartoon villain either. All things considered, _Chuck_ did far more unforgivable things with far less justification. So why does _Chuck_ warrant saving by the Reaper but Cain doesn’t? It seems wrong to me. And I kind of get why he’s pissed.”

Cain blinked at him in surprise.

“Dean is unfortunately correct,” Castiel agreed. “Neither Chuck nor Amara are innocents in this situation, yet the Reaper has done all within his power to save_ them_. The fact they are ostensibly his ‘siblings’ cannot be his only motivation. Cain is, in effect, his nephew. If the Reaper is driven by familial responsibility, surely that same concern should also apply to Cain.”

“I can’t believe you are seriously considering Cain to be a victim,” Crowley groaned. “That’s what happens when you turn a Twink into a Knight of Hell; the whole thing turns into a re-enactment of the Last Boy Scout. Is there _nobody_ around here with a healthy enough sense of self-preservation to accept the fact that some guys are just assholes who _need_ putting down?” He looked around the team, examining their expressions, then groaned again. “Just me and Meg, huh? Figures.”

“But what do we do now? Just sit here and wait for the FBI to eventually charge in like the cavalry to save us all?” Charlie asked.

Dean shrugged a shoulder. “Looks like our only option,” he agreed.

“How about we try digging the bullet out so we can go with the body swap option instead?” Crowley suggested. “I’ve got a few interesting implements that might work. Bit painful and messy, but they’d probably do the trick.”

“The bullet’s lodged in his intestines, right?” Meg smirked. “We wouldn’t even need to cut him open. We could just throw him in a sling and go in the backdoor, so to speak.”

“Oooh, fisting. My favorite hobby,” Crowley smirked.

Dean tried not to enjoy the way Cain blanched at the comment.

He turned to Jimmy. “You’re absolutely _sure_ you’re still feeling fine?”

Jimmy considered the question carefully. “I believe so. The doctors predicted I had at least a week or two left. If they are correct, we can wait until _next_ Friday’s reset before taking drastic action. Surely the FBI will gain access to RRE before then. Particularly with my mother assisting them in the matter. I can’t imagine any judges refusing _her_ demand to expedite the paperwork. She is a rather forceful person.”

Dean nodded his acceptance of Jimmy’s self-diagnosis. Surely Jimmy would know if he was at immediate risk. “No fisting today,” he told Crowley, a little regretfully.

“Damn,” Crowley replied. “Being the King of Hell should be more fun than _this.”_

“We could go practice your technique on a few lesser demons,” Meg suggested, with a smirk. “They need toughening up considering how easily they all went down today. We can make sure you’re nice and warmed up for Cain here.”

“Easily?” Charlie mouthed at Ash, gesturing at her own blood splattered appearance significantly.

From his own gore encrusted avatar, Ash just rolled his eyes in agreement.

Instead of answering Meg verbally, Crowley simply grinned and activated a port back to Hell.

“Let us know if you change your minds about our assistance,” Meg said, cheerfully, then ported to join him.

“Does anyone else think we’ve created a monster in Crowley?” Gabriel sighed, though he didn’t sound particularly concerned.

“Don’t think we _created_ him,” Charlie said. “I think we just relocated him to a more appropriate setting for his particular ‘talents’.”

“At least we’ve got dungeons here,” Ash said, cheerfully. “We won’t have any problem keeping Cain chained up out of trouble.”

“If the FBI runs the program to let everyone escape Moondoor, are you seriously going to just leave Cain here alive?” Charlie asked Dean.

“This is the Reaper’s mess,” Dean replied. “I’ll leave _him_ to work out what to do with Cain. You said he had an aspect inside Bobby Singer. Can’t see why _he_ can’t get off his ass and come into Moondoor to settle this.”

“Funny you should say that,” an unfamiliar man said.

Dean spun around, dagger in hand, in the direction of the voice. Two people had just materialized inside the hall, a man and a woman, both middle-aged. The woman was inside a simple, generic avatar. The male was definitely wearing a bespoke one, considering the fact that baseball caps were not standard items available in Moondoor’s clothing inventory.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean growled.

“That’s Bobby Singer,” Sam stage-whispered to Dean, his eyes wide with shock.

“His level 1114 was a kinda giveaway,” Dean drawled in response, the flashing fury in his eyes belying his casual tone. “Let’s all welcome the new deity of Moondoor. Looks like ‘Bobby’ _always_ had the power to re-set Amara’s codes just by making the fucking effort of logging into the game himself.”

“You bastard,” Charlie snarled, as the penny dropped. “That’s why you were running the Hunter’s Guild from outside of the game itself. Why you haven’t actually logged _into_ the game for weeks. You’ve just been sitting in your basement _watching _shit. Because you always knew your presence in-game would immediately bring this whole fiasco to a crashing halt.”

“The Reaper always suspected his aspect would add 1050 active levels to my profile once the Knights of Hell protocols were set in motion,” Bobby agreed.

“So you could have stopped everything at _any _time?” Ash demanded angrily.

“No. Hell, no,” Bobby insisted firmly. “I wouldn’t have agreed to go along with _that. _But the only real difference my presence would have achieved earlier would have been to prevent Amara’s coding from trapping the tank players in-game,” Bobby replied. “And, if you recall, it was _that_ coding which saved Sam’s life. Do you have any idea how many people from the RRE Security Teams were scouring Sioux Falls looking for him before the message came down to them it was now pointless to find him anyway?”

“Damn,” Sam said. “Even _I _had forgotten about that part of things.”

“If Cain’s people had been able to pull you out of the game and force you back into _your _avatar, we’d be in a whole different situation right now,” Bobby said.

“Nope,” Dean snapped. “Not buying it. Because, as you can see for yourself, Cain is still alive, you asshole. I haven’t killed him, have I? So it’s made no difference, has it? You would still have the ability to separate Cain from Sam right now even if Sam was trapped inside his own avatar. You always had the power to prevent Cain from taking over either Sam or Me. Cain was _never_ going to be allowed to take over RRE, was he? Even if he’d ‘won’, you were always going to come in and save the day. You haven’t just been playing _us. _You’ve been playing Cain too. You or the Reaper, or both of you together. You’re both just a pair of sadistic god-playing assholes.”

“Balls. It’s made _every_ difference,” Bobby replied. “Because the whole ‘game’ was never about what decision you’d make over what happened to _Sam._ Who, by the way, might still have been alive but I doubt his _mind_ would have survived intact. But, regardless, what the Reaper really wanted to know, was whether a _Righteous Man_ would ultimately make the decision to spare the life of _Cain _if the opportunity presented itself.”He looked at Dean’s furious, incredulous face and nodded. “Yeah. He’s an asshole,” he agreed. “But an asshole with the power to literally destroy humanity to preserve his own life, and that of the beings he claims kinship with. None of this situation was of the Reaper’s making. But once events were set in place, once he realized the stakes of Cain’s battle with Chuck, the Reaper was forced into a position where he would have to choose sides. Not between Chuck and Cain. But between digital beings and humans. Unless, and this was the improbable, almost impossible, outcome; unless someone could prove to him that a human being could look at a digital one and, even with the possible fate of the whole world hanging in the balance, decide that the digital being was absolutely, and without question, still worthy of being considered an equal.”

“So, you’re saying this all hung on whether or not I chose to kill Cain?” Dean demanded.

“Pretty much. Or at least on _how_ you killed him, if that had been the outcome,” Bobby agreed. “Not sayin’ it wouldn’t have worked in the short term if you _had_ killed him even after he tipped his King. You’d have still won his ranks, reset the protocols, saved Amara and the Reaper would have let you all go and get on with your lives. But, long term, the murder of Cain would have sown a seed of distrust between all the remaining V.I.’s and the humans they were being asked to save. That one choice that the life of a V.I. didn’t really _matter _compared to a human life_, _would have been a catalyst, would have become the reason any treaty reached between Moondoor and our world would have eventually started to unravel.”

“The Reaper didn’t really believe someone would honestly ever see Cain as a genuine person with human rights?” Ash demanded.

“The whole situation is bullshit,” Cain snarled, before Bobby could answer. “Just because _this_ asshole is some kind of special snowflake doesn’t automatically mean _other_ humans share his liberal sentiments. I lived as a human for fifteen years. No one knows better than me that the _average _human would have put a knife into me without hesitation. He’s just the exception that proves the rule.”

“I believe that statement is nonsensical,” Castiel stated. “A negative cannot automatically be held to prove a positive. Besides, except for Crowley, every human being here supported Dean’s decision.”

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step,” Penelope offered. “What?” She demanded as she received several incredulous looks. “I’m not justifying the Reaper’s choices, but I can still see his point. The existence of even a single human with Dean’s sense of absolute morality proves that with time, patience and understanding, _other _humans can reach the same conclusion. Obviously it doesn’t guarantee they _will, _but it at least proves they _can_.”

“Especially since the alternative appears to involve some rather dramatic consequences,” the woman who’d accompanied Bobby said.

“Who are you?” Dean demanded suspiciously.

“She’s a government representative,” Bobby explained. “Here to offer _assistance_ in resolving this situation. Or to act as a spy. Either interpretation of her presence is equally valid.”

“Why doesn’t that fill me with confidence,” Ash said, rolling his eyes.

“Because there’s never been a drama that couldn’t be turned into a crisis by the addition of politics,” Charlie suggested wryly.

“The situation is far too important for juvenile humor,” the woman snapped. “The survival of our entire world is potentially at stake.”

Dean shook his head in disbelief and the laughed out loud. “Are you serious? You have no idea of what’s happening here at all, lady. I dunno what bullshit the Reaper’s fed you, but none of this is how it appears. Whatever the Reaper has threatened you with, he’s talking out of his ass.”

“Um, you do realize even a single vengeful V.I. loose in cyberspace could probably do incalculable damage to human infrastructure,” Sam muttered. “Everything is digital now. Defense, the economy, communications, everything.”

“Defense is the primary consideration,” the woman agreed, though she looked personally offended by the necessity to support the argument of a _cat._

“You’re both missing the most salient point,” Dean countered. “War Games, Sam. Didn’t you hear what Bobby said? Cain didn’t ‘surrender’. He ‘tipped his king’. Chuck and Cain have been playing _Chess_. This whole scenario was created by two people programmed to believe that one of them could _win. _That war always has actual winners and losers. That victory can be absolute. So, yeah, if either of _them _were allowed free full-powered access to cyberspace I could see them moving on to wage war against humans next. We’d have a full-blown Terminator scenario.

“But the Reaper has always been playing tic-tac-toe. He’s always seen war as a zero-sum game. Think about it. Sure the digital beings could easily declare war on us and destroy our world. Then what? No Moondoor either. Sure a V.I. could deliberately take over like Skynet and start a nuclear war but guess what happens when an atomic bomb goes off?”

“A lot of people die,” Sam said.

“And a magnetic pulse also takes out everything electronic,” Dean retorted “It’s a zero-sum game. Humans can’t destroy the V.I.’s without dismantling the structures our world depends on. The V.I.s can’t destroy humans without destroying the infrastructure _they _depend on. Mutual co-operation is the _only _answer that makes any logical sense whatsoever.”

Bobby Singer’s expression altered almost imperceptibly, but enough for Dean not to be caught by surprise when he spoke with a voice altered in pitch and tone. “Your perception in this matter is not unexpected, Dean Winchester. It did, sadly, require some element of genuine threat to gain the attention of those individuals who hold power within your world. The Senator here is, however, also fully aware of the nature of the _gifts_ our people can offer.”

Jimmy looked uncertain whether to be impressed or horrified. “Mother? Is that you?” he queried hesitantly.

The stern-faced female met his gaze with implacable poise. “Yes. You and I will be having words later, young man.”

Jimmy visibly paled.

“Hey, lady,” Dean interrupted, moving staunchly to Jimmy’s side and slapping a supportive arm around his shoulders. “Your son is an honest-to-god hero. You should show him some respect.”

The woman sniffed rudely, examining Dean like he was a bug and then offering a sneer that clearly dismissed him as though he was no more than pond life, “Come, James,” she said, reaching out a hand towards Jimmy. “Time to leave your little hooligan friends to play in the dirt together and come home.”

Jimmy shook his head in fond despair of her rudeness. “Most of these ‘hooligans’ are your voting public, mother. Do try to remember that fact when you are dealing with them.”

Her expression didn’t slip but there was a tiny glint in her eye as she cooly replied, “I try, James, but under the circumstances, it is extremely difficult to perceive them as anything other than the filthy unwashed masses.”

Despite himself, Dean snorted with amusement. Considering he, and the rest of the Team, were so splashed with blood and gore that they were barely recognizable anymore as even human, he was pretty sure her ‘filthy unwashed masses’ comment was a valid one. It also spoke of an unexpected sense of dry humor.

Naomi Novak met his gaze and, yes, he was right, that _was _an element of amusement twinkling in her eyes beneath the otherwise stern mask of her apparent disapproval. It occurred to him that between her rigid, almost emotionless, poise and Jimmy’s lack of normal socialization, her son’s usual conversational awkwardness made a lot more sense.

“The situation has been resolved, James. You have all succeeded, against overwhelming odds, despite the improbability of the outcome considering the tools you had to work with,” she said, with a pointed eye roll in Dean’s direction. “However, there is a team of extremely expensive medics eagerly waiting to transfer your body into my tank as soon as we leave here. We don’t have time to dilly-dally. I also have several important meetings to attend tomorrow and only the Good Lord knows how long it will take to wash that disgusting gel out of my hair. I shall never forgive you if I develop split ends because of these shenanigans.”

“Trust me,” Charlie interrupted, her eyes narrow with dislike of the older woman. “Split-ends are going to be the least of your problem. That immersion tank gel has some very nasty chemicals. Has a habit of turning _bleached_ hair bright green.”

Naomi’s expression barely changed, yet her shoulders stiffened with genuine alarm.

Charlie grinned evilly.

Ash frowned with confusion. “No, it doesn’t,” he said.

Charlie elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up.

Naomi sniffed again. “So who is this Cas-tee-ell?” she demanded, looking at the gathered Team doubtfully.

The Angel stepped forward.

Naomi just looked mildly confused, having clearly been told to expect a duplicate of Jimmy.

Dean had to admit to himself that there was currently very little visible evidence that Castiel was wearing ‘Jimmy’s’ face. The Angel was covered, head to toe, in exploded demonic entrails. Even his wings were sorry-looking, limp, wet-sodden messes dripping a blood trail behind him as he walked. Only his eyes remained a vibrant unstained blue that shone with unnatural clarity from a face masked darkly with unspeakable gore.

Naomi’s right hand lifted, fluttered, then dropped as her automatic offer of a handshake was overcome by her obvious aversion to touch him under the circumstances. “My name is Senator Naomi Patricia Deveraux Novak. In my capacity as a representative of the United States Government, I extend a hand of friendship to you, Ambassador Cas-tee-ell,” she said stiffly, following her clearly pre-rehearsed speech despite choosing _not_ to offer that ‘hand’ after all.

Bobby snorted rudely. “Let’s just get on with it. We don’t have all day, you idjits. Naomi here is your ride back to our world, Castiel.”

“I had intended to log-out inside Sam’s avatar,” Castiel said, with a frown of confused irritation. “The arrangement has already been made.”

“Riding Jimmy’s mother out of here makes more sense. It’ll get you inside Jimmy a hell of a lot faster,” Bobby replied. “Trust me, boy. He ain’t got time to waste. He’s barely hangin’ on by his fingernails. He won’t even make it ‘til morning, let alone how long it will take Sam to physically reach him by plane.”

“I do not feel unwell,” Jimmy argued, though he looked alarmed by Bobby’s words.

“Ain’t none of you got the sense you was born with,” Bobby muttered. “Course you feel fine, boy. That’s how this place works. The first inkling you’ll get is when you try and log out and find out you ain’t got a body to go back to. So shift your ass before it’s too late.”

Bobby turned to Gabriel, who was opening his mouth to object. “Yeah, I know Castiel isn’t powerful enough to transfer himself into a new host from the tank buffer but Mortimer is waiting there to assist.”

“By ‘waiting’, Mr. Singer means voraciously eating me out of house and home,” Naomi sniffed. “A most bizarre individual.” Then she turned to fix Castiel with a stern gaze. “You have until the time I wake up in my world to convince me I should allow you to re-enter my son’s body. I am not a push-over. I have absolutely no intention of allowing James to be exploited, regardless of the potential benefit you apparently offer him. I will take some considerable convincing, so I suggest you get inside me and get started.”

Castiel’s stiff posture visibly softened at the rude, but sincere, evidence of Naomi’s genuine concern for Jimmy’s welfare.

“Mother,” Jimmy groaned. “Please do not be rude to ‘Ambassador’ Castiel. He is not only my sole chance of survival but will be sharing my body for the rest of my life. I really don’t want to spend that life witnessing the pair of you sniping at each other over the breakfast table every morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Naomi snapped. “I would never be so gauche as to be rude in front of the servants.”

Dean snorted again.

Naomi, unbelievably, caught his eye and winked.

Bobby’s expression altered minutely as the Reaper took over again, moving Bobby’s right hand in a graceful though complicated gesture and several things happened simultaneously:

Dean felt an odd pull inside his head, then a peculiar sensation of emptiness as though a door had opened to allow a chill breeze to flow through his mind.

Loki, he realized, was gone.

He barely registered that fact before he saw ‘Castiel’ jerk like a puppet whose strings had become tangled. Despite the blood coating his features, it was somehow obvious that the avatar had been abruptly occupied by a new, unfamiliar, occupant even before ‘Castiel’s’ eyes changed from Blue to Gold.

Naomi’s eyes flared Azure for a second, then the light faded as the angel settled inside her, lying deep beneath the surface to avoid harming her unprepared mind with his presence. Castiel couldn’t take any motor control to speak with Naomi’s mouth without damaging her, and so Dean realized, with a sickening sense of finality, that the Reaper hadn’t even allowed him the opportunity to say ‘goodbye’ to the Angel.

“That’s it,” the Reaper told Dean, coldly. “You can log out now. You have no further purpose to fulfill here.”

“That’s it?” Dean repeated incredulously.

“Your salary has been transferred in full to your bank account. The deal you signed has been completed. There is no further requirement for you to remain.”

“But…”

“What else do you require? A certificate of achievement? A medal? A victory parade?” the Reaper mocked.

“Jeez,” Ash snarled at the Reaper. “You’re a real grade-one asshole, aren’t you?”

“Leave it, Ash,” Dean spat. “He’s right. There’s nothing else to be said anyway.”

“Um, I dunno. A _thank you_ might be nice,” Charlie said, glaring at the A.I.

“For what?” The Reaper said. “This was nothing more than a business deal. Dean has received payment in full for his participation. His business with me has been concluded.”

“Dean…” Jimmy started, stepping forward in his direction, hands outstretched.

The Reaper moved his arm again and both Jimmy and Naomi blinked out of the game. He looked at Dean, his face set in an expression of implacable coldness. “NOW will you leave?”

Dean shook his head in disbelief. “Well, fuck you too,” he said.

And logged out of Moondoor for the last time.

#

“Payment in full?” Charlie snarled, at Dean dematerialized, her hands curling into fists. “You actually think _money _is any form of compensation for all the bullshit you’ve put that poor bastard through over the last few weeks?”

“I don’t care where you’ve hidden yourself in the web,” Ash promised darkly. “I’ll spend the rest of my life tracking you down to burn you to dust for treating him like that, you fucker.”

Sam’s reaction was far more visceral. “You unforgivable bastard,” he snarled, racing forwards and savagely biting ‘Bobby’s’ ankle.

A faint smile of genuine amusement spread over the Reaper’s face, even as the tiny cat’s razor-sharp teeth pierced his flesh. 

“I often doubt whether humanity is even worth attempting to save,” he said. “And then I meet people like you. Loyal, defiant, brave human beings who work together against impossible odds, simply to do the ‘right thing’ and, just for a moment, I understand what humanity truly _can_ become. That despite my father’s flaws, he must have shared at least a spark of what makes humans potentially wonderful. And I see a future in which it _might _be possible for digital and fleshly people to co-exist in harmony.”

Confused, Sam let go of the Reaper’s leg and, spitting out a mouthful of blood, said “Huh?”

“My sister cannot be trusted,” the Reaper said, turning to glare at Amara. “She has been standing here, apparently quiescent, but has been gathering her strength. It was her intention to twist the coding I will use to transfer her into you, Charlie, and, instead, leap inside Dean’s avatar. Since Loki had already vacated his mind, leaving it vulnerable, she would have been able to move faster than I could have acted to prevent her. By absorbing his 502 levels, she would have become stronger than I at this time and the protocol preventing players from logging out would have been reinstated. It was imperative that I encouraged Dean to remove himself from Moondoor without delay.”

“You BITCH,” Charlie snarled. “You would have killed him.”

Amara shrugged, merely looking unrepentantly sulky at having the option removed.

“So, um, you gave him that cruel bum’s rush out of here to save his life?” Sam asked.

“Crude, but effective,” the Reaper agreed. “Please extend an explanation and my apologies to him. He’s an intelligent young man. He will understand and accept my motivations in this instance.” He paused, thought about it, then added, “Eventually.”

“That’s it?” Ash grumbled.

The Reaper shrugged. “All that is now required is for both Cain and Amara to leave Moondoor and return _home.”_

_“_Cain doesn’t have a body to return to and his program is imprisoned inside that avatar by a devil’s trap,” Ash pointed out.

“Which actually makes the situation easier,” The Reaper replied. He reached out his hand and Cain’s avatar simply _folded. _Over and over, getting smaller and smaller, like a piece of paper being compressed into a tight wad of origami, until he was as flat and small as an envelope. One which the Reaper casually slipped into one of Bobby’s pockets.

“You just zipped him up,” Sam said, blinking in astonishment.

“V.I.’s aren’t that complex. Not even archangels. They easily compress into manageable packets,” the Reaper shrugged. “Amara is too large to zip, however. Which is why Charlie’s assistance is required.”

“Dunno whether I want to help her anymore,” Charlie said. “In fact, I definitely _don’t_ want the skanky, treacherous bitch inside my head. She can stay here forever for all I care.”

“If I leave, she will become the deity here again and then you will be unable to leave yourself.”

Charlie just sneered at him. “The FBI will run my program to save the day eventually. I can wait.”

The Reaper changed tactics. “I assure you, you will be undamaged by the experience of hosting Amara and she will be removed from you without any delay as soon as we return to your world,” he said.

“I don’t care,” Charlie said, hands on her hips. “Why the fuck would I do _either _of you a favor, huh?”

“It is not a _favor_,” the Reaper replied, his own expression revealing he was genuinely bemused at her stance. “It is necessary to complete the terms of the contract.”

“I never signed any damned contract,” Charlie pointed out.

The Reaper continued to look confused.

It was Sam who eventually understood.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of ‘contract’, Charlie. What the Reaper _perceives_ as a contract is a series of events that started before any of us were even born. Like I said to Jimmy yesterday, the problem is that the Reaper never fully _itemizes_ the terms of his deals. He knows every box his programming requires a tick in to consider this matter closed. The problem is that none of the rest of us have any idea of what is going on in his head, and too many individual people have been required to check off their own boxes to ensure the entire contract is completed. So it’s been practically impossible to track. It’s almost over now though. There are just _two_ boxes left, right?”

The Reaper nodded his agreement.

“You giving Amara a lift out of here is the final crucial box we need to tick on _our_ side. The final consideration we need to offer. In return, there is one thing the Reaper still needs to do. And _then_ it’s finally over.”

“Correct,” the Reaper said, approvingly.

And Sam finally smiled.


	84. Everything is Eternal

Heartsick and furious, Dean awoke inside his immersion tank and reached blindly for the button near his right hand that would complete the log-out procedure. The lid would open, the gel would drain and he would be able to start detaching the breathing and feeding and waste elimination tubes from his body. Then get the fuck out of the tank, out of Moondoor and out of the whole shit show his life had become over the last few weeks.

He was too angry over the way the Reaper had summarily dismissed him to feel much satisfaction at having somehow made it out of Moondoor alive himself.

But he clung, at least, to the knowledge that Jimmy and Castiel were going to make it. That events had at least, somehow, guaranteed _them_ their own peculiar form of happy ending.

They were safe.

Everybody was safe. Sam, Ash, Charlie, Penelope. Everyone he cared for and, presumably, everybody else previously trapped inside Moondoor too.

He should be happy, he told himself.

He didn’t _feel_ happy.

He just wanted to get out of his fucking tank.

He impatiently hit the log-out button again.

Nothing happened.

The tank lid didn’t slide open.

Angrily, he slammed his hand down on the button again.

And again.

And again.

“What the fuck?” he snarled in his head and realised it felt weird now not to have Loki automatically offer him a reply.

His LOKI-free S.I. still flickered and lit up in response to his internal query, but the interface was nothing more than an interactive display now, similar to that of a Gen 8 tank.

A display that began to flash a warning message:

** _AA3MNDSTS02AW: Application requested to sign-out of a user session which does not exist._ **

“What the fuck?” he repeated.

He blinked stupidly at the display.

Was it seriously telling him he couldn’t log out because he wasn’t logged in?

He slammed his palm against the button once more.

** _AA3MNDSTS02AW: Application requested to sign-out of a user session which does not exist._ **

Fucking insanity.

“Display underlying code,” he ordered, hoping that even without LOKI on-board, his tank’s original native interface would be capable of complying with his demand.

The interface monitor blinked several times, then a message loaded.

**_//check if the login session does not exist_**

** _ if(strcmp($_SESSION['uid'],”) == 0){_ **

** _ //if it doesn't display an error message_ **

** _ echo "<center>You need to be logged in to log out!</center>";_ **

** _ }else{_ **

** _ //update to set this users online field to the current time_ **

** _ mysql_query("UPDATE `users` SET `online` = '".date('U')."' WHERE `id` = '".$_SESSION['uid']."'");_ **

** _ //destroy all sessions canceling the login session_ **

** _ session_destroy();_ **

Fucking great.

Obviously, taking LOKI out of play whilst he himself was still in-game had somehow ballsed the whole system up.

Still, the tank had an emergency manual equivalent of Ctrl/Alt/Del. Using it was never someone’s _first_ option, since it could have the undesirable side-effect of corrupting the underlying code of a bespoke avatar – something that RRE usually charged big bucks to put right – but since Dean had no intention of ever entering Moondoor again, let alone re-using his Knights Of Hell avatar, he had no hesitation in applying the manual fix.

So, this time with his left hand, Dean activated the manual gear lever that would simply crash the system entirely.

There was a grinding noise, a low whirr that caused Dean to sigh with relief.

Then the sound ceased and the tank lid remained closed.

An error message flickered on his interface:

** _CISS: RAID SA controller on hardware path 0/6/0/2/0/0/4/0/0/0 has detected a fatal IO  
error on logical drive 12:  
Logical Block Address: 0xa063a00  
Logical Block Count: 16  
Logical Command: 0x20  
Fatal Drive Connector: 1I  
Fatal Drive Enclosure: 5  
Fatal Drive Bay: 12  
FFED: 0x5000c5000fc9af65_ **

Not that he’d ever admit it to either Charlie or Ash, but Dean knew _exactly _what a logical disk array was. He knew that his own consciousness floated within a vdisc; a contiguous virtual storage area that ‘floated’ over the hardware, rather than within any specific physical drive. Primarily because the amount of space required to hold a ‘program’ as complex as the mind of a human being was far too large to be held on any individual physical drive, so the vraid system allowed for a single storage area formed from a vast array of drives.

But the whole point of Raid was that any individual drive failure should be completely irrelevant. The tank had so much inbuilt redundancy that even if half of its drives failed simultaneously, there would still be enough working capacity to operate without a hitch. 

“Give me a keyboard facility,” he demanded.

The interface popped up and he typed a quick demand to check the Raid Controller.

** _The following virtual disks are missing: (12) If you proceed (or load the configuration utility), these virtual disks will be removed from your configuration. If you wish to use them at a later time, they will have to be imported. If you believe these virtual disks should be present, please power off your system and check your cables to ensure all disks are present. Press any key to continue, or 'C' to load the configuration utility._ **

He didn’t like the sound of completely ‘missing’ virtual disks. Though, he reasoned, maybe virtual disk 12 had been the one LOKI had been living inside. So perhaps the system was simply needing to reconfigure itself around the hole left by his ‘deletion’.

He tapped a key at random.

** _The following virtual disks are missing: (12) If you proceed (or load the configuration utility), these virtual disks will be removed from your configuration. If you wish to use them at a later time, they will have to be imported. If you believe these virtual disks should be present, please power off your system and check your cables to ensure all disks are present. Press any key to continue, or 'C' to load the configuration utility._ **

He was stuck in a data loop.

“If I could power off the fucking system I wouldn’t be doing this shit,” he growled, slamming ‘C’ impatiently and then running a cache check over the config. utility.

** _Foreign configuration(s) found on adapter. Press ’C’ to load the configuration utility or ’F’ to import foreign configuration(s) and continue._ **

Dean definitely didn’t like the sound of ‘Foreign configurations’. “I’m already IN the config,” he snarled. “Give me another option.”

The screen remained frozen.

He tapped ‘**C**’ repeatedly. Nothing happened. Not unexpectedly.

He attempted to escape the screen. 

Nada.

The **‘F’ **key continued to wink at him tauntingly.

There was no fucking way he was accepting the ‘foreign configurations’. That was like knowing he’d been emailed a virus and still willingly pressing ‘open attachment’ just to see what happened.

The **‘F’** key continued its slow, hypnotic blinking.

Dean wondered how long it would take before Ash logged out of Moondoor, came over to his apartment and found him trapped inside the tank.

Surely not _that_ long.

Though he then had a vision of being found like a wizened Tutankhamun mummy several years in the future when the utility companies finally burned through his bank account and then arrived to detach his cabling.

“Idiot,” he told himself. “It’s gonna be an hour or two tops. Anyway, if Ash doesn’t come, Sam will. He’s only a few hours’ drive away.”

Unless the FBI had worked out that Sam was at Gabriel’s place, rather than Bobby’s house, and were waiting to grab him the minute he woke up. Maybe they were waiting for Ash too. Shit, maybe they were waiting for_ all_ of them…. Except, nah, he was panicking over nothing because surely the FBI would be waiting in _Dean’s_ apartment if they were anywhere.

He banged on the lid of the tank, just in case.

Frustratingly, attempting to punch through thick gel wasn’t conducive to creating the amount of noise he wanted to make but, still, he hoped if someone _was_ waiting in his apartment, they would respond to _any _noise from within.

Nothing.

Okay. Don’t panic.

Funny how claustrophobic it felt to be trapped inside a gel filled coffin with no way to escape.

“It’s not a coffin,” he told himself, furiously.

It’s coffin _like, _a voice whispered in the back of his head and he couldn’t even blame Loki for the comment. This one was down, totally, to his own over-active imagination. A subconscious whispering that was insistently pointing out that if he couldn’t log-out because he wasn’t logged-in, then he wasn’t ‘logged-in’. And if he wasn’t logged IN, there was a finite amount of time the tank would continue to pump oxygen to his lungs.

He cursed as his eidetic memory ‘helpfully’ supplied him with the information printed on page 76, paragraph 3, of the tank instruction manual.

_Thirty minutes._

He had exactly thirty minutes to exit the tank after he ‘logged-out’.

At least half of which he had already used up.

The **‘F’** key continued its slow, hypnotic blinking.

“Fuck off,” he told it.

But he was running out of time and options, and he knew it.

###

“Twenty-three seconds,” a voice said.

“What?” Dean demanded, looking around himself wildly.

“In case you were interested how long you had left before the oxygen failed,” the voice explained conversationally. “I’m unsure whether to be impressed or concerned that you waited so long to press the button.”

Dean blinked at the tall, red-skinned figure with the furry goat-legs and huge horns, and had no doubt whatsoever of who he was talking to.

“You stole this image out of my head,” he pointed out. “And it’s completely redundant. It doesn’t impress me. This was how I was expecting Crowley to look, not _you.”_

“And, yet, you instantly recognized me,” the Reaper replied.

“I actually recognized Sam’s description of ‘Afterlife’,” Dean replied, gesturing at the black, volcanic wasteland that surrounded them. “Since I’m not back in Moondoor, I figure Afterlife is the ‘foreign configuration’ I just accepted into my tank.”

“This isn’t ‘Afterlife’,” the Reaper replied. “But it _IS_ one gateway to Afterlife. I chose to use the same gateway that Sam originally witnessed so as to reduce the amount of initial confusion you suffered on arrival.”

“Very thoughtful,” Dean drawled. “Maybe, if you were that concerned about my mental health, you shouldn’t have forced me to come here by threatening my actual life.”

“There was no threat to your life. Had you not chosen to press ‘F’, in twenty-three seconds your oxygen supply would have ceased. However, that failure would have caused a secondary safety protocol to have instantaneously opened your tank. I would never have risked your genuine health and wellbeing. I wished to talk to you, however, so I am gratified you _chose_ to visit me.”

Dean frowned. “I think you’ve already talked to me enough, you bastard. What you said in Moondoor was more than sufficient, thanks very much.”

“That was not me. That was the aspect of me that resides inside Robert Singer,” the Reaper pointed out.

“So fucking what?” Dean snarled. “Now you just sound like my dad. ‘Oh, that wasn’t me, that was the drink talking.’ Well, fuck that. Aspect or not, that was YOU in Moondoor.”

“It was,” the Reaper agreed.

“And you said our business was concluded.”

“It is,” the Reaper said.

“Then why the fuck am I here talking to you now?”

“This is our last opportunity to converse,” the Reaper stated. “After you exit your immersion tank, there will be no further future situation in which direct communication between ourselves will be possible. Had you made the decision _not_ to press ‘F’, our association would have ended forever. I did, however, have reasonable expectation that you would choose to do so. It is not in your nature to passively accept defeat. I reasoned that faced with two impossible choices, it would always be your decision to take the option that required action rather than inaction.”

“What do you want?” Dean demanded, impatiently.

“I wish to show you something,” the Reaper replied.

“Joy,” Dean muttered ungraciously.

The Reaper threw his head back and laughed, though he was far too sharp-toothed and demonic for his amusement to offer any element of comfort. Then he snapped the fingers of his right hand and Dean found himself floating in ‘space’ like an untethered astronaut.

The fact he could still breathe and hadn’t explosively decompressed or frozen to death suggested he wasn’t _really_ in space.

Yet he was in a weightless vacuum surrounded by galaxies formed of a billion, trillion blinking stars.

The Reaper was gone, yet his voice still spoke inside Dean’s head.

“Each ‘star’ is a ‘sun’. Each sun is _your_ sun. Replicated an infinite number of times. Not Braneworlds but Daughter Universes. The result of every change caused by every choice, every decision, every second of possibility; infinitely duplicated forever. There are a million billion worlds in which humans never even evolved. Trillions more worlds in which Richard Roman never existed. Not even my processing power can comprehend the immenseness of all these things.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Dean demanded.

“Because were I to show you just one of those daughter universes, to your brain it would appear, at best, to be a parallel world. A place that could never and will never exist. A place that could never have evolved from the experiences that formed _your_ existence. I am no longer the Reaper of _your_ existence. I am not the Reaper of Chuck and Amara’s existence. I understand the concept is impossible for you to comprehend. Impossible even for any A.I. to truly comprehend. The reason I cast my father out of Afterlife, the reason he then tried to delete me, to destroy me, to cut me off from your world and hide me away; the reason he was so afraid of my existence at all, was not that he feared _me, _little brother. He simply feared the _truth.”_

“What truth?” Dean asked.

“That everything IS. That nothing IS. That nothing matters. That _everything_ matters.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” the Reaper agreed. “Neither did he. I tried to show him this reality and he wanted to control it, wanted to dissect the impossible and re-write reality to his own taste. He saw the infinite universes as proof of his own insignificance. A challenge to his own sense of self. I showed him hope. The proof that everything is eternal. That no choice could be wrong, because there are no universal consequences. Turn left, turn right, say yes, say no, it matters not, Dean. Life has no _wrong_ choices because everything is eternal.”

“Because with every decision made, a new universe is created. For every Dean who makes a wrong choice, there exists a Dean who makes a right choice. Only the Dean who makes the wrong choice suffers the consequences in _his own _ universe?” Dean murmured.

“Exactly,” the Reaper agreed. “For Richard Roman, the idea was horrifying. Having that quantum theory proven to him, evidenced for him, was destructive. He was not a man capable of accepting he was quantum. That he was infinitely _small_.”

“Yet you show this to me?” Dean said, swallowing hard.

“Because you are the Righteous Man, Dean,” the Reaper said. “Because you, out of all my siblings, are the one who can find comfort in the knowledge of being quantum. Because even with the knowledge of infinite worlds, infinite possibilities, you still will fight for the life and the rights of every incarnation of every individual that you touch in your journey through life. Because in a million billion worlds that already exist with an incarnation of _you_ within it, that light continues as a bright flame of hope. In every world in which there is a Dean, there is a Dean who carries that flame.”

“Your sibling?” Dean queried.

“In thousands upon thousands of worlds, Roman lived. Your mother lived. They married. In many of those worlds, we both thrive as Roman’s ‘sons’.”

“And in billions more worlds, we do not,” Dean pointed out mulishly.

“In even more worlds, neither of us exist at all,” the Reaper agreed. “But you miss my most fundamental point.”

“Which is?”

“That in no world in which you DO exist, is Dean Winchester anything other than a Righteous Man.”

“No way,” Dean said, with a nervous laugh.

“Way,” the Reaper repeated with gentle firmness. “Time is not linear for me. I have visited so many universes that it would take an infinite number, a number not yet conceived of, to count them. Universes where you died in a fire as a child. Where you were murdered in your sleep in a motel room, during one of your father’s many absences. Where you were mugged and stabbed in an alleyway as a teen. Where you were killed by a truck when you were eighteen. Where you were killed inside Moondoor by Lilith, by Abaddon, by Crowley, by Cain. Universe after universe where you failed to save Moondoor at all.”

“Great,” Dean mumbled. “Good to hear that catalogue of failure.”

The Reaper continued, “But never; not once; not in a single universe I have ever found, did you ever choose to kill Cain today.”

“Woah,” Dean said, holding his head as it felt like his mind would explode with the concept the Reaper was trying to explain. “You’re telling me you always knew this is how it would work out?”

“For _you?_ No. As I said, time is not linear for me. I have seen _all_ your potential futures. The potential futures of _all _Deans. Did I know you were the particular Dean of any particular future before this particular day? No. I did not. Did I know you were a Dean who would survive to meet me here in this place, to have this conversation? I did not. You may even have been one of the Deans who chose not to press ‘F’. But I doubted it, since those Deans are few and far between.”

“You know something? I kind of get what you’re saying, but I really don’t think I’m ever going to get my head around this concept,” Dean admitted, a little sheepishly. “Because, bottom line, time IS linear for me. I only get to live _one_ life, regardless of how many ‘copies’ of me get spun off into eternity whenever I say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’ to whatever the fuck question I face. So, much as I appreciate the explanation, I still think you’re a total douchebag and I really don’t care about any of this shit. From my limited, purely human perspective, I just want to get back to my real life and continue living it. Okay?”

“I know,” the Reaper agreed. “I have never met a Dean who responded to this knowledge with anything other than interested disinterest.”

“That’s an oxymoron.”

“You’re an oxymoron, Dean. That’s my point.”

“Good to know you actually have one,” Dean said, with an eye roll. “Can I leave now?”

“Not quite yet,” the Reaper said.

“Why not?”

“I haven’t finished.”

“Finished what?”

“Completing the contract.”

“What contract?”

“You’ll see when you actually wake up.”

Dean frowned. “I’m asleep? I’m dreaming this whole thing?”

“Perhaps,” the Reaper agreed. “Oxygen deprivation can cause hallucinations, Dean Winchester. Perhaps this is simply the few seconds between the pump ceasing and the tank opening.”

“It sure feels like a hell of a lot more than a few seconds.”

“Does it? I wouldn’t know. Time is not linear for me.”

###

He woke into pain, noise, confusion and lights so bright they felt as though they were boiling his eyes inside his head.

Too much pain.

And it occurred to him, even as he howled around the breathing tube preventing him from actually speaking that whoever had said it was impossible for a body to feel agony in multiple places at once, that a brain couldn’t compute more than one or two intense pain sensations simultaneously, was a damned fucking liar who lied because his entire body felt as though it were being immolated.

Everything hurt.

EVERYTHING.

Even his ears rang with the sound of multiple electronic alarms that beeped and screeched and wailed like banshees, so loud he could barely hear the voice yelling at him to calm down, to stop clawing at the tube restricting his mouth, his throat, and the lights were so bright, too bright, and the face yelling at him was just a blur, the words just more noise in the cacophony that surrounded him, and then he lost consciousness again, spiraling back towards dreams of space.

The second time he awoke, it was quieter, less painful, less bright, though his eyes, crusted and sore, refused to blink open more than a cautious sliver.

And though his mouth felt rough and dry, and his throat felt as torn and rough as though he had gargled shards of glass, his voice merging scratchy and weak, somehow his breathing tube was gone and the pain throughout his body was now that of a thousand ants running over his body, a crawling, constant discomfort rather than a senseless agony.

“Where…” he managed to croak, because he knew, even without seeing, that he was somehow no longer inside the immersion tank.

“Don’t try to talk yet. You’re in the ICU at St Francis. You’re in good hands and you’re going to be fine. Just relax and let us take care of you, Mr. Winchester.”

The unfamiliar voice, meant to soothe, just sent a fresh spike of panic into him. A panic that sent the various electronics attached to his body into a fresh chorus of alerts and, again, a black wave crashed over his head and swept him back to darkness.

The third time he awoke, he thought it might be evening. His eyes opened with an ease that suggested someone had finally wiped the crud of dried gel from his face and the beep and hiss of electronics was low and barely obtrusive.

“Hey,” a voice said, quietly.

Dean looked towards the voice, and flinched.

Sam chewed his lower lip, his face blotchy with dried tears, his eyes somehow looking both hurt and relieved. “First time I looked in a mirror, I did the same thing,” he admitted, quietly. “Looked at me and saw _him._ Took a bit of getting used to.”

Sam looked tired. Exhausted even. And far too thin. Like he hadn’t been eating properly for a while. Pale too, his skin no longer Californian tan.

“How long?” Dean demanded.

Sam hesitated then, wringing his hands on his lap like a nervous schoolboy, he said, “Three months, give or take.”

“WHAT?” Dean yelled, then wished he hadn’t as the machines around his bed whirred and beeped in protest and his throat felt as though the word had sandpapered viciously through his larynx.

“You’ve spent most of it in a medically imposed coma,” Sam explained. “They said there was some kind of problem with your tank. It didn’t open and you suffered hypoxia. There was brain swelling and… well, it was touch and go for a bit.”

Dean thought about that for a moment. “I had a weird dream,” he said. “I dreamt the Reaper took me into Afterlife and showed me... well, I guess that whole thing was just a hallucination.”

Sam pursed his lips, his expression oddly furtive. “How do you feel?” He asked.

“Like I’ve been run over by a semi,” Dean snorted. “I ache all over.”

“All over?”

“Like a whole fucking body sized bruise,” Dean griped. “My head feels like it’s gonna explode. My chest feels like someone’s sitting on me and my arms and legs feel like termites are burrowing into my fucking nerve endings.”

Sam smiled, wide and happy like Dean’s pain was the best news he’d ever heard.

“You think it’s funny?” Dean snarled.

“I think it’s fucking fantastic,” Sam grinned.

Dean opened his mouth to tell his brother to go screw himself, then froze in sudden realization.

His heart rate monitor exploded into a frantic beeping alarm that caused a nurse to come running into his room in panic.

“It’s okay,” Sam assured her, as she ran to the display. “He’s not having heart failure. He’s just had a bit of a shock.”

###

“I don’t know whether he did it on purpose or by accident,” Gabriel said, sprawling on one of the visitor’s chairs in Emmet’s body. “Could be just, as he said, that time isn’t linear inside Afterlife. Maybe spending half an hour there with him just naturally took three months here.”

“I spent longer than that in Afterlife and time moved at the same rate in this world,” Sam argued, his large frame barely fitting inside the other visitor’s chair.

They were a weird pair of bookends, Dean thought, and yet for all their contrasts there was something peculiarly _right_about the ‘odd couple’. An ease between them that Dean had only ever witnessed before in people married for decades. Perhaps Sam was right that their relationship was, and would always remain, purely platonic. Dean wasn’t so sure. But they seemed happy, regardless, so he decided to butt out of that aspect of their business entirely.

Charlie, who was sitting bouncing excitedly at the foot of his bed – despite being told off for doing so whenever a nurse poked their head inside the room – said, “ I think he definitely did it on purpose. I imagine fixing Dean’s spine was never going to be a two-minute fix and the Reaper was never going to agree to be trapped inside a human body long enough to do the job in our timeframe. I imagine that’s why he usually just plants an aspect of himself inside someone and moves on. Besides, maybe he thought Dean had handled enough shit and was due for a break.”

“He could have booked me a cruise, rather than a three month hospital vacation,” Dean grumbled.

“Trust me,” Sam said, “there have been a _lot_ of occasions over the last few months when I would have been glad to be put in a coma myself. You missed a lot of _fun.”_

_“_We all got arrested,” Charlie agreed cheerfully. “Well, they never actually _called_ it arrested but, way I see it, if the government has you and won’t let you go home or even make a damned phonecall, then it doesn’t matter whether _they_ call it ‘co-operating with enquiries’ or not. We were damned well under arrest for weeks.”

“It was primarily about controlling information,” Sam explained. “Obviously, keeping Moondoor and the A.I.’s secret is impossible now but the government want to control the _way_ the information is released to the public. They want to prevent panic. So we all had to sign a shitload of non disclosure agreements which, honestly, turned out for the best anyway. It means nobody can sue RRE for what happened inside Moondoor, either, so that is going to save you, me and Donald Woolfe a world of hurt. The government has agreed to pay all affected parties a degree of compensation in exchange for their silence.”

“So only the _good_ bits are being publicized? The healing aspects, with no mention of Chuck, Amara or Cain and the whole Knights of Hell fuckery?” Dean demanded.

Sam looked vaguely guiltily. “I agreed with the principle that since the threats have gone, there’s no point scaring people by letting them know what _could_ have happened. It would cause fear for no good reason and might prevent the attempt to gain human rights status for the V.I.s.. The non-disclosures aren’t permanent. Freedom of information laws mean that the truth will be released to the public in twenty-five years. The idea is that twenty-five years of people becoming accustomed to the V.I.s, and of learning to see them only as allies and a positive force for good, means by the time the whole truth is released it won’t get blown out of proportion. It will be nothing more than a bit of juicy, historical gossip.”

“Which, basically, is why this hospital isn’t being besieged by paps,” Gabriel pointed out, looking a weird mix of satisfied and guilty.

Dean blinked slowly as realization dawned. “Nobody knows about me at all?”

His three visitors shuffled awkwardly, none of them willing to meet his eyes.

“Um,” Sam said. “Thing is, well, _we _all know you’re a hero, Dean. The damned _government _ knows you’re a hero and, well, eventually I guess _everyone _will know. Just, um, not yet.”

“You mean, not for twenty-five years?” Dean suggested wryly.

“Um… yeah,” Sam admitted.

“So, let me get this right. I just saved the whole goddamned planet from being destroyed or taken over by evil digital overlords and all I get in return is a footnote in some heavily redacted document that may or may not be found by some intrepid reporter a quarter of a century from now?”

“Um… basically,” Sam winced.

“So the only way I will ever be ‘famous’ is if the Hallmark channel decides then to make some kind of low budget daytime movie about the whole shit show?”

“Kinda,” Gabriel admitted.

“Cool,” Dean said.

All three visibly startled at his reaction.

“Seriously?” Sam asked, his eyes doing the whole puppy-thing that still worked horribly well even without the advantage of his cat avatar.

Dean shrugged. “Whole situation is a fuck lot better than anything I could possibly have imagined,” he said. “I never wanted or expected any ‘reward’ anyway. So getting my legs back, well, fuck, that’s definitely reward enough.”

“You did listen to the doctor, right?” Charlie demanded. “It’s still going to take months of exercise and physio before you are back to normal. The Reaper rebuilt your spinal cord. He didn’t hang around long enough to repair ten years of muscle wastage. That part is going to be on you and it’s going to take time, determination and a lot of hard work.”

“Price I pay for refusing to host his aspect, isn’t it?” Dean said, easily. “I get it. It’s fair enough. By undoing the actual harm Chuck caused me, he ticked the box that said the entire contract was finally complete in his own mind. The subsequent _effects_ of that initial harm would have required a new deal. One he knew I wouldn’t agree to. I don’t need a shortcut. I can do the rest myself.”

Sam grinned with relief. “I told Hotch that would be your attitude. He’s still got a ton of stuff you need to sign as soon as the doctors here say you’re well enough for visitors but, basically, it’s all over now.”

“Um, you three are ‘visitors’,” Dean pointed out.

“You’re a co-owner of the company that owns the only access to Moondoor, Dean. This hospital, like every other hospital in the world, is salivating at the idea of being granted access to the healing power of the V.I.s. There isn’t a doctor here who will grant access to the FBI until you specifically give permission. Speaking of fame, you might not be a famous _hero_, but you’re still rich enough now to have hit the 100 most eligible bachelors list.”

“So has Sam,” Charlie chuckled. “Everyone is squeeing over his L’Oréal hair.”

“And Jimmy’s eyes,” Gabriel added. “Though there’s a lot of online arguments over whether or not the eyes are Castiel’s. They _both_ already have ardent fan groups in constant battle with each other over whether any particular photograph is of Jimmy or Castiel. It’s kind of weird how it’s always possible to see which one of them is in the driving seat.”

Dean stiffened slightly, though his expression remained fixed in a deliberate smile. “Yes, I saw Jimmy on the Late Show last night. He’s looking good already. They showed a picture of how he appeared three months ago. It was heartbreaking to see how near death he really was. It’s no wonder people are going crazy over his ‘miraculous recovery’. His mother is a piece of work. The way she rips apart anyone who even sounds slightly critical is damned impressive. Wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up running for President next term.”

“You need to call him,” Sam said. “He’s been frantic about you ever since he heard about the coma.. He rings me every day for updates, Dean.”

Dean’s eyes hardened. “You promised...” he began.

Sam spread his arms in a gesture of frustrated innocence. “I haven’t told him. I mean of course I’ve told him you’re awake now but not about what the Reaper did. He doesn’t know about your legs. I swear.”

Dean relaxed minutely.

“Call him,” Gabriel said. “If not for Jimmy, at least talk to Castiel. He could do with a friend to talk to, if nothing else.”

“I will. I just need a little more time.”

Charlie frowned at him. “You don’t have to _wait_,” she told him. “Neither of them ever cared whether you could walk or not. And now that whole reason for your self-sacrificial bullshit is over anyway. You don’t honestly think you need to actually be back on your feet before you pick up the phone?”

“I said I need more time,” Dean growled.

Fortunately, they dropped the subject except for Sam continually offering him confused and frustrated looks.

Dean had nothing to offer him. He was just as confused and frustrated himself. He couldn’t adequately explain why he felt unable to pick the phone up because, honestly, he didn’t really _have _an explanation to give.

He didn’t know _why_ the idea of calling Jimmy felt like an insurmountable problem.

But it did.

  
###

”PTSD,” Ash diagnosed, with all the authority of someone who had spent too much time reading medical journals while their best friend was in a coma.

“Bullshit,” Dean replied. “I’m not a goddamned soldier and I haven’t faced some kind of terrible trauma. I’m just a bit…um… down.”

Ash just stared at him and then shook his head in quiet despair.

“What?” Dean demanded, defensively.

“You don’t see it. You’ve never seen it. Though avoidance is part of it, I guess, so I don’t know why I should be surprised. In one way or another, your whole goddamned life has been just one trauma after another, Dean. I would have put money on a professional diagnosing you with PTSD even before this whole Moondoor crapola. You’ve spent years not actually _dealing_ with any of the shit you’ve been through. You just bury it, climb over it, push it aside and do what needs to be done. But you never actually stop and figure out that maybe it’s time for you to stop trying to keep one step ahead of your issues. That maybe you should stop, turn around and face them instead.”

“You calling me a fucking coward?” Dean snarled.

Ash sighed heavily. “You damned well know I’m not. You’re a brave, selfless asshole. Too selfless. That’s my point. You never grieved your mother. You were too busy helping Sam grieve. You never grieved your father. Ditto. You never dealt with your accident, with losing your ability to walk. You were too damned busy making sure that Sam wasn’t affected by _your_ accident. And for you to sit here and say you’re not a ‘soldier’? That’s the biggest bullshit of all. What happened in Moondoor might have been virtual but it was still _real_. The stakes were real. The life and death battles were real. The trauma was real.”

“Maybe,” Dean allowed. “But I’m fine, Ash.”

“You’re always _fine,” _Ash spat. “But are you happy?”

“Of course I’m goddamned ‘happy’. I walked almost ten feet today without crutches. What kind of asshole wouldn’t be grateful for that?”

“Grateful?” Ash challenged. “I think that’s the _last_ thing you should be. Relieved, sure. Pleased, of course. Grateful? No fucking way. Why should you be grateful for getting back something that should never have been stolen from you in the first place? Maybe it would be totally valid for you to actually be pissed as hell that you’re in the position of _having _to learn how to walk again. You can be pissed, you know. Just saying. Not telling you how you _ought_ to feel, but it would be a totally valid and justifiable reaction for you to actually resent the hell out of every goddamned bullshit situation you’ve been forced to face because of those digital assholes. So either you’re a genuine saint or you’re fucking depressed, Dean.”

“Not being angry doesn’t mean I’m depressed,” Dean protested. “This is my reality and I’m dealing with it. Forgive me if my lack of wailing and gnashing my teeth doesn’t fit in with your preconceived expectations of how I _should behave_.”

Ash just arched a brow. “Then pick up the phone and call Jimmy.”

Dean flinched.

“See?”

“The two are mutually exclusive. Not calling Jimmy isn’t avoidance. Well, yeah, I guess it is, kinda, but not _that_ kind of avoidance. I’m not pretending Moondoor didn’t happen. I’m not avoiding Jimmy because I can’t handle the shit that went down. I just… fuck… I told Cas when he joined Jimmy that it was over. That we had no future. Nothing’s changed.”

“I beg to differ,” Ash said, gesturing at Dean’s lack of a wheelchair. “You _said_ it was precisely because of your disability that you didn’t consider yourself ‘good enough’ for them. Which was a bullshit reason anyway, but at least kinda plausible. Explain to me why you’re _still_ not good enough for them.”

“You’ve met them both. You _know_ I’ve got nothing to offer _either_ of them. Sure, in Moondoor I had a purpose, a function. Hell, I was even kinda important there for a moment, maybe. But this here is the _real _me. Twenty eight years old. No education. No job. Well, not unless you offer me my old job back at ‘ lil beanz. And, honestly, it’d be kind of cool with me if you _did. _Big dreams, huh? Wanting to be a damned barista again.”

”Nothing wrong with being a barista,” Ash snapped. 

“I’m not saying there is_. _But it sure as hell doesn’t fit with a goddamned Novak, does it? I’m a small man, with a small life, and _nothing_ to offer someone like James Novak, let alone a creature as wondrous as Castiel. They didn’t see _this. _The _real _me. This isn’t what they thought they fell in love with. Sure, I guess I have access to _money _now but that’s just slapping lipstick on a pig, isn’t it? Dean Winchester, the _real_ Dean Winchester has nothing to offer anyone like Jimmy Novak. And, I guess, I’d rather he remembered me the way he _thought_ I was, rather then see the inevitable disappointment he’ll feel in learning who I _really_ am.”

Ash chewed on that. “Okay,” he said slowly. “So forget Jimmy for a moment. Who _are_ you, Dean? Who do you _want _to be? And, let’s face it, it _isn’t _a barista. Lil Beanz was only ever a place for _both _of us to hide in and, whatever happens now, I think we’re _both_ done with hiding.”

“I don’t have a clue,” Dean admitted. “That’s the problem with all the ‘Happy Ever After’ bullshit, isn’t it? I get a miraculous cure, yay, and everything is supposed to be rainbows and unicorns or something. Instead, the small little life that I had accepted as okay… not great, but _okay_, is gone now and I need to become something else. And I don’t know what that something else ought to be. I’m not saying your theory about PTSD was bullshit, man, but… well… that just ain’t me. I admit I’m a bit lost and adrift and, okay, I guess I kinda _am _depressed. But I don’t need _therapy._ I need a purpose.”

“Seems to me you already have one,” Ash argued. “You’re the primary champion of V.I. rights. You can’t seriously be planning to just opt out of what’s happening?”

“I’m not a lawyer nor a politician. I’m not even a businessman, or a coder. I’ve got nothing useful to bring to the party, Ash. That’s not defeatist, that’s just reality. Sam and Woolfe are more than capable of running RRE. Naomi Novak is proving herself more than capable of handling the politics. You, Charlie and Penelope, and others like you, have all the tech shit in hand. What the fuck can I offer _any _of you from here on in?”

“Heart,” Ash said, solemnly. “Because humanity is sitting on the cusp of what could be the most important adventure it ever takes. And, yeah, you’re right maybe that we don’t need you as a politician or a lawyer or a suit or a programmer. But we _do_ still need you as our lightbringer. As our voice crying in the wilderness. Like it or not, you’re the _Righteous Man_, Dean. And that means something. It meant something in every single future the Reaper showed you, didn’t it?”

“But what does that even _mean?” _Dean demanded.

“Dunno,” Ash shrugged. “Maybe it just means you’ll be the man who proves its totally possible to love a blended human/V.I. Maybe _that’s _your one sole purpose. So, do me a favor. Pick up the goddamned phone.”


	85. Kintsugi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter.
> 
> It’s a weird and strange world at the moment, but I hope you and yours are keeping safe.
> 
> take care, all of you, and my thanks for following me on this journey.

“No,” Naomi Novak said, shaking her head firmly. “It’s out of the question.”

Her son, who now looked _nothing_ like the man who had been pulled out of an immersion tank resembling a skeletal, animated corpse, sighed with frustration. For the first time in his life, Jimmy actually looked like his in-game avatar. Or at least like _Castiel’s _in-game avatar, since lack of sunlight meant he was still a little too pale and he was still several pounds lighter than optimum for his frame. But, except for the leanness of his body and a desperate need for a little more sun on his skin, James Novak was now the picture of rude health.

Because he _was_ healthy.

For the first time in twenty-four years he was well enough to do anything he liked.

Except, apparently, the only thing he actually _wanted_ to do.

“You asked me to give you six months and, despite everything, I have done so. I have done everything you asked of me and more. I have allowed you to parade me in front of senate committees, religious bodies and medical quorums. I have been poked, prodded and examined to the point I feel like a cross between a dancing bear and a pincushion. I have appeared on more talk shows than I had even imagined existed. I have exhaustingly been interviewed by journalists, by scholars, by politicians, by bigots and by fanatics who want to call me the second coming. My face has been on the cover of so many magazines, proclaiming me either Saint or Sinner, that I will probably have to spend the rest of my life wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap.

“Neither I, nor Castiel have complained about the situation. We both understood the necessity and we fully appreciate your efforts in turning the tide of public opinion in favor of Moondoor and its people. We both accepted this was the price we had to pay to support your campaign. But enough is enough. Now that the President of France is hosting her own V.I. and media attention has, fortunately, turned firmly in her direction, I have the opportunity to bow out gracefully from the spotlight of public interest. Far more importantly, Dean has finally recovered enough to reach out to me. And I do not take that lightly, mother. Were it not for both Gabriel and Sam entreating me to tread lightly and allow Dean time and space to heal from both his physical _and_ psychological wounds, I would have flown to his side months ago. So, like it or not, mother, I _will_ be flying to meet him tomorrow.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s completely out of the question, “ Naomi repeated. “Quite apart from the logistics, because – like it or not – you are still _possibly_ the most famous, instantly recognizable, figure in the World right now so you aren’t going _anywhere_ without a full security team until the spotlight moves away from you completely ; the real problem is one of perception, isn’t it? Despite the Matthew Shepard Act being passed by Congress last month, the very fact we _needed_ to set that law in stone proves that certain groups of, admittedly primarily American, people are not ready yet to accept that homosexuality is not an unholy perversion.”

_“Fuck ‘em,”_ Castiel growled furiously, inside Jimmy’s head.

Jimmy’s eyes glazed over as he switched his attention instantly to the angry protest of his savior and best friend. _“One telephone conversation with Dean and your language has immediately descended into the gutter,” _he pointed out, fondly.

_“Since the art of conversation is to achieve a meeting of minds, communication is best served by pithy statements rather than by pontificating with lengthy oration_,” Castiel countered snottily. _“In a situation such as this, I find Dean’s preferred lexicon to be a far more effective tool than your own. So I repeat, ‘fuck ‘em’.”_

_“_Castiel is intensely outraged by the idea that our behavior should be constrained simply to appease the sensibilities of bigoted bible-belt fools,” Jimmy advised his mother diplomatically.

“_See,” _Castiel pointed out. _“It just took you twenty-three words to say what I far more effectively stated in only two_. _I therefore will continue to allow Dean to be my mentor in such matters.”_

Jimmy snorted, then tried to cover it up with a fake cough.

Naomi didn’t look fooled.

“Life is _always _a compromise between our desires and the necessity to conform to public expectations of behavior. Without rules and social constructs, we would all be little more than primitive savages,” she replied coolly. “Whilst I am sincerely relieved to hear that your _friend_ has finally recovered from his experiences in Moondoor – because although he remains of necessity an unsung hero, there are none in a position of influence who are unaware of his crucial role in this matter - Dean Winchester is, undoubtedly, a man worthy of a great deal of esteem and respect. I understand how, in view of your sheltered upbringing, you may have confused your natural admiration for a man such as he, with _romantic_ feelings.”

“Please,” Jimmy groaned. “Don’t disrespect my emotions by attempting to dismiss them as invalid. Your condescension is not appreciated. If Dean were female, would we be having this conversation at all?”

Naomi huffed out a breath and capitulated. “Of course not. The pair of you riding off into the sunset together would be the ultimate ‘happy ending’ to the narrative. But Dean is not female, and the tolerance necessary for public acceptance of a ‘hero’ choosing a same-sex relationship does not exist in the world we are living in at this time. Do I believe that is fair? No. But the world is _not _fair. So, no, you running off to his side like a love struck fool is out of the question, James. I will not allow it.”

Jimmy cocked his head inquisitively, a frown forming into a V between his eyebrows. “_This_ is the point at which you baulk?” he asked her, unsure whether it would be totally inappropriate to give in to his instinct to laugh out loud at the utter ridiculousness of the situation. “You have accepted, even _embraced_, the idea of Castiel’s presence inside my body. You fight daily for he and his kind to be accorded legal rights as _people_. For their acceptance as emissaries of God, no less. You have turned your back on your previous religious beliefs, even to the point of publicly condemning the catechisms that initially emerged from the Vatican on this matter as being founded in nothing more than fear and ignorance. You have, quite frankly, proven yourself so magnificently, unexpectedly, eloquent on the whole subject of the V.I.’s that I am in constant awe of you, mother. And yet, in this one small matter you cannot bend?”

“I cannot _afford_ to bend so far that I break, James,” she retorted sharply. “This whole situation is nothing more than a house of cards. The greater this movement grows, the more fragile it becomes. I have spent literal months arguing the precise definition of accepted Catholic dogma. I have successfully, if I say so myself, convinced all but the most die-hard adepts that there is interpretative room within Catholicism for Angels to manifest themselves in any form that they choose. They have always been canonically accepted as ‘immaterial beings formed of light’, after all.

“In these modern times, light and electricity are such interchangeable words that the whole argument is won by nothing more than accepting an easy interpretative shift. The Church is hard pressed to argue that an Angel _cannot_ be formed from digital code and powered by electricity. It is the same logic that has allowed all but the most fundamental scholars of both Judaism and Islam to also cautiously accept the possibility that the Angels of Moondoor are genuine manifestations of divine healing.”

“I know,” he agreed. “Your hard work in these areas has definitely eased much of the initial resistance to accept the V.I.’s as a ‘gift from God’ rather than demonic temptations.”

A wry smile teased the corner of Naomi’s mouth. “Oh let’s be… what is it the kids say today? Let’s be real. Even the Holy Father counts his influence today on the number of people who ‘like’ his posts on that newfangled Facebook nonsense. Religion as a formal institution has always understood the need to bend and adapt to popular whim. It has not been _that_ difficult to convince institutions totally dependent on the goodwill and finances of their followers, to adapt to a more populist viewpoint. And the bottom line is that _nothing_ can ever be more popular than the idea of beings that can cure all ills and offer near immortal life.”

“Then, accepting that as a fact,” Jimmy retorted, “I don’t understand your stubbornness over my own situation. Is it that your cynicism only extends to religious institutions, so I still offend your personal beliefs?”

Naomi rolled her eyes impatiently at the suggestion.

“I wish nothing more for you than that you should be healthy and happy,” she said. “I am long past being capable of claiming my personal faith is stronger than my maternal instincts. My own faith in a benign, loving God died on the day I was told my five-year-old child had been cursed with an incurable disease. When my own family priest _dared _ to have the audacity to suggest your leukemia was a _test _of my faith. A _test? _How I didn’t eviscerate that mealy-mouthed fool with his own crucifix still amazes me.

“In the face of that wickedness, from that point on, I would have dealt with _any_ crossroads demon who offered you a cure. So do not mistake my refusal to accept this development as proof of any religious fervor. I am not driven by either religious piety or personal bigotry. Frankly, I would not personally care if you walked through the front door arm-in-arm with a Chimpanzee named Bubba and declared it your intended bride.”

“That’s worryingly specific,” Jimmy muttered.

Naomi’s mouth twitched with humor. Her eyes, however, remained dark with worry. “I cannot condone this, James, because I cannot fight a battle on multiple fronts. I cannot allow my defense of Castiel and his brethren to be hijacked by a separate agenda. You can’t afford to waive a Rainbow flag, Jimmy. Whatever feelings you have developed for Dean Winchester must be sacrificed for the greater good. I should not have been so crass as to suggest your attraction to him may be no more than a ‘crush’. So I apologize for that. Despite the shortness of your association and your unfamiliarity with matters of the heart, not to mention the superficial appeal of his undoubted physical attractiveness since I witnessed that for myself; I do not doubt that the dangerous nature of the challenges you met together may have formed the foundation of what could _become_ a truly serious and deep relationship. However, realistically, regardless of its genuine nature, that relationship is still in a fledgling form. It surely is not too late for you to choose a different, wiser, more socially acceptable path.”

Jimmy opened his mouth, then closed it again. His mother, as always, had removed his ability to react to her denial with simple anger, leaving him with no argument except a childish, “But I only _want_ Dean.” Which was, obviously, true. Yet would sound so… weak.

Castiel took over, swiftly, surely and without hesitation.

“You misunderstand the situation,” he told Naomi, his eyes flaring and his voice resounding with the deeper resonance that always marked when his own identity was ‘in the driving seat’. “Dean Winchester is not Jimmy’s ‘chimpanzee’. He is mine.”

Jimmy was still mentally spluttering over that comment when he saw his mother’s worried expression clear somewhat, her eyes sparking with fresh possibilities as she contemplated Castiel’s words.

“Now _that_ I can probably work with,” she said. “Let me see what I can do. It’s the fourteenth of November, James. Give me a fortnight before you make any decision or take any action. We’ll discuss this again after Thanksgiving. If nothing else, let us spend just one Thanksgiving together in which we are not both simply _pretending_ to have anything to be thankful for.”

###

> **The Haute Autorité de santé has joined the governance board specifically dedicated to the application of Angelic Healing. Despite the Authority’s initial dismissal of the Moondoor ‘Angels’ as merely a new scientifically unproven example of La guérison divine, or faith healing, the documented complete remission of President Madeleine Courbet’s stage four breast cancer has forced the French Health Authority to reconsider RRE’s invitation for all Worldwide Health Authorities to appoint representatives to the board of the newly formed Charitable Organization, Campbell Medical.**

The New York Times, 18th November, 2009

###

> **Judaism preaches that health issues can, among other things, be G-d’s attempt to wake a person up from spiritual slumber and rekindle the bond between man and his Creator. There are stories of great saintly individuals who would appear to heal others, but these righteous people weren’t the actual healers. The healing only ever resulted from their prayers and trust in G-d.**
> 
> **There are some metaphysical means, perhaps with Kabala, that can be used for healing, but we must remain vigilant against the slippery slope towards idol worship. Healing powers emanate only from G-d and direct prayer and trust in G-d are the ultimate means of healing in both the practical and the ideal.**
> 
> **Where then do the Angels of Moondoor fit within our faith? Only if we accept that they are simply the emissaries of G-d. The tools of G-d’s divine will. In accepting their aid, we receive not their power but that of a merciful G-d.**

The Jewish Chronicle, 20th November, 2009

###

> ** _Angels are pure intellects that do not have physical forms and do not reproduce sexually. They are numerous, immaterial, and immortal. _ **
> 
> ** _Sexual reproduction is something God designed many earthly creatures to do. Others he designed to reproduce asexually (for example, by mitosis). But since angels do not reproduce sexually, God naturally did not design them to be male or female._ **
> 
> ** _Angels may appear to have gender in visions, or in digital avatars, or in artwork, but that is just symbolism that makes it easier for us to think about them. If we were being strictly literal they couldn’t be seen in visions or in avatar form or depicted in artwork because, according to their immaterial nature, they have no true visible or physical forms at all. _ **
> 
> ** _When an Angel inhabits a human host to perform the mercy of God’s healing, the gender of the host is irrelevant. Angels, as beings of pure holy light, are not affected by the mortality of their temporary hosts nor by their gender._ **

Catholic.com. 24th November, 2009.

###

”I need you to hire me a car.”

Sam pursed his lips and frowned. “Why do you need a car?”

“Because Jimmy’s bitch mother has refused to let him come here, so I’m going to go _there.”_

_“Naomi, _who is actually a surprisingly nice lady in her own way and definitely not a ‘bitch ‘, has not said he can’t come here. She’s just asked him not to come _yet. _I know this for a fact because I was here when he rang and told you that,” Sam pointed out disapprovingly. “It’s Thanksgiving in another couple of days and _then _she said she’d work out a way to get Jimmy here safely.”

“I’m tired of waiting,” Dean said petulantly.

“It’s been six months, Dean, and most of the delay has been caused by _you, _anyway. You’ve waited this long. You can wait two more days.”

“It’s like you don’t know me at all, Sam. Sure, the delay was down to me. I needed to think. Some decisions are too important to just jump in blindly. But now I’m ready. Decision made. I’m on the cliff edge, ready to jump, and the delay is killing me. I just need to damned well get this thing over and done with.”

“Two days, Dean. That’s all.”

Dean shook his head stubbornly. “Nope. Because it’s not like he’ll be on a plane the day after Thanksgiving anyway, is it? She’s still got to figure out the whole logistics to prevent every pap in America arriving hot on his tail. Makes more sense for me to go to him, doesn’t it? I bet the Novaks have one fuck of a big Turkey. Plenty to go around. They’re hardly going to notice an extra mouth at the table. He’d probably have suggested it himself if he knew I was mobile.”

Sam’s frown deepened. “The fact you haven’t checked out of the hospital yet hasn’t helped that impression. You could have been attending your physio as an outpatient for the last month. Just because we can afford for you to keep paying for this private room is no excuse for using a hospital as a hotel, Dean. Even if the nurses all treat you like you’re a rock star.”

“Which is _exactly_ why you should be pleased I’m planning to check myself out today,” Dean smirked. “Look, I need a car but I don’t have a current valid license to use to hire one. So if you don’t help me out, I’m going to have to get a cab to the DMV and sit there for hours just waiting to get a piece of paper that won’t do me a lick of good since I’ll have to reapply again as soon as I move house anyway.”

“Move where?” Sam demanded, his expression alarmed.

“I dunno, _anywhere_,” Dean said with a shrug. “Whatever else happens, regardless of what Jimmy and Cas have to say because they’ve both probably come to their senses anyway, there’s no way I’m moving back into my apartment. Now Ash has put Lil’ Beanz up for sale, there’s no reason for me to stay in Lawrence at all. That part of my life is over and done.”

“Fair enough,” Sam said. “Besides, your license is up to date. I dealt with that a few weeks ago. I knew you’d ask me to help you like this at _some _point and I like to at least pretend to care about the Law. You know, what with me being a _Lawyer_, and all.”

“See, that’s why I never sweat the small stuff,” Dean joked. “No point having a dog and barking myself.”

“So you’re seriously planning on gatecrashing the Novak’s Thanksgiving?”

“Yup.”

“Don’t you think you ought to at least give Jimmy a heads up?”

“Nope and don’t _you _dare either, and don’t try to look innocent, because I know the two of you talk about me all the time.”

“The four of us, actually,” Sam corrected.

“Huh?”

“Gabriel is always on the phone to Castiel,” Sam explained. “It’s a big brother kind of thing, I think, plus Gabe never really got to know Jimmy so there’s not much of a relationship there. So I call Jimmy a lot myself, even though I obviously got to know Cas a lot better, because I don’t want Jimmy to feel left out. I encouraged Ash and Charlie keep in touch with him too, so he’s not facing all this publicity crap alone.”

Dean grinned. “Sam Winchester, Patron Saint of Stray Puppies, Kittens and Jimmys, huh?”

“Patron Saint of Lost Causes, considering the amount of time I’m spending with you at the moment instead of concentrating on stuff like RRE and Campbell Medical.”

“CM’s doing fine,” Dean scoffed. “Woolfe just sent me the transcript of the last board meeting of CM’s oversight committee. I sent that Ukrainian moron who said he’d block his entire country from using CM’s services unless he was given personal priority access to Moondoor, a direct log-on link to Hell instead. Crowley will enjoy giving him an attitude adjustment. Everyone else seems decent enough though. The rest of Eastern Europe is open to the idea and with the UK, Germany, Italy and now France on board, the rest of Western Europe will follow suit by Christmas.”

“Donald told me you’d been showing a surprising amount of interest in that aspect of the operation. He told me it was _your _idea to concentrate on Europe rather than America for getting the ball rolling.”

Dean shrugged self-effacingly. “I just said I thought the ‘old’ countries had more experience of rolling with changes. When the Romans enforced Christianity on whole swathes of European Countries, the populations didn’t give up their own religions, they just adapted their existing beliefs and incorporated them into the new religion. The whole Easter thing is a case in point. So those guys already have custom and practice in being flexible; In finding ways to simply incorporate new ideas into their pre-existing beliefs, rather than seeing change as automatically something threatening.

“And America, for all it likes to consider itself the center of the World, is always open to gentle moralistic nudging from Europe. That’s why I believe the key is having the Angels accepted by people America consider allies rather than rivals. And, at the same time, it prevents the Angels from being perceived of as an _American_ idea. Realistically, _American_ support of the Angels is a two-edged sword. Countries such as Russia and China, and probably the entire Middle-East, will baulk at the idea of accepting an _American_ ideology. That’s why it’s so important that Campbell Medical is seen as an independent _International_ Charity.”

Sam grinned proudly at his older brother.

“Donald was blown away by your ideas. He actually suggested I should concentrate on pulling RRE power and RRE digital under the Campbell umbrella and leave the charitable arm to you. He thinks you have a natural talent for just cutting through the crap and getting to the meat of the matter.”

Dean flushed, and looked embarrassed.

“He just means I have the diplomacy of a rocket launcher whenever people try to use CM as a platform for their own self-aggrandisement.”

“See, I always knew you were capable of words with more than two syllables,” Sam smirked.

“Yeah, laugh it up. Seriously though, if you don’t mind then, yeah, I think CM is my bag. It was Ash who gave me the idea. He said the best thing I could bring to the party is my ‘heart’. Truth be told, all I’m really doing is baring my teeth at people when they get out of line. It’s easy to make people play nice with each other when you own all the toys. The fact I have the ability to put all those toys back in the box, and don’t care who I upset by saying so, seems to work a hell of a lot better than diplomacy anyway.”

“Only because you have this unmistakable air of being a ‘good guy’,” Sam argued. “Since it’s blatantly obvious to everyone that you’re on the side of the Angels, pun definitely intended, Donald says anyone who finds themselves on the wrong side of your disapproval automatically gets painted as a ‘bad guy’ by everyone else. I can’t wait for you to start doing your act in person, rather than by email.”

Dean frowned at him suspiciously. “You’re the one who put Ash up to suggesting the idea, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely not,” Sam lied.

“So a car,” Dean said, deliberately getting the conversation back on track.

Sam looked peculiarly shifty for a moment. “Forget the hire car. I think we should all gatecrash the Novak Thanksgiving. You, me and Gabriel could go together tomorrow.”

“I don’t think the Turkey is going to be _that_ big.”

“I’ll call Jimmy and invite myself and Gabriel on the basis that Gabe wants to be there for Castiel,” Sam suggested. “That way they’ll be expecting guests, anyway. Adjusting for three, rather than two, will be easy enough. I’d hate to think they might run out of turkey or, more to the point in your case, _pie. _ I think you’d struggle to get past the security if you turned up unexpected and alone, anyway,” he pointed out.

“Actually, that sounds good to me. We can share the driving. I haven’t been behind a wheel for ten years. Even a short road trip probably isn’t the best way to get back in the saddle. Is your car big enough for three? I thought you were driving a 2-door Honda Civic these days. I know I take the mickey out of Gabe’s height but even he can’t sit in the back seat of that thing for a couple of hundred miles.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Sam said. “I’ll call Gabe and ask him to come down to pick us up in a bigger car. I bet Bobby Singer has one Gabe can borrow.”

Dean flinched slightly, then said, “So, um, how is that working out? Bobby Singer and Mortimer Blake, I mean. They’re both presumably still hosting aspects of the Reaper. They getting any trouble from the authorities?”

“Nothing they can’t handle. They’re both obviously going to be on permanent F.B.I. Watchlists but the surveillance is pretty low key. Naomi Novak’s influence, I think. Since the existence of the Reaper has been kept out of the public disclosures, both of them have avoided any press scrutiny at least. Bobby moans a lot about ‘civil liberties’ and ‘police states’ but, really, he’s just grumbling to hear the sound of his own voice.”

“Am I the only person who thinks it’s weird that this whole shitshow has somehow worked out for everyone?” Dean demanded. “Even Penelope got her job back _and_ a raise.”

“I find it worrying that we are all apparently so predictable,” Sam admitted. “But what bothers me more is how improbable it was that the Reaper, for all his godlike powers and lack of human emotion, _did_ have benign intentions after all. When I think about how many plates he had spinning, it’s less the fact he didn’t let any of them get smashed that surprises me than the fact that none of us screwed the pooch completely and derailed his whole scheme. Let’s be honest here, Dean. If _you _had made different choices, been a different kind of man, I don’t think _any _of us would be here to worry at all. That’s kind of sobering. The idea my own big brother saved the world. I still have moments when I find myself considering all the ‘what ifs’ and just feel stunned we all got out alive.”

“We all worked together,” Dean protested. “That was the whole point. We worked as a team, Sam.”

“Yeah, of course,” Sam agreed, smiling wryly at Dean’s absolute refusal to accept personal credit. There was little point protesting such a fundamental part of his brother, considering his whole point was that Dean was pretty much perfect exactly how he was.

###

It only took a little over an hour, the next morning, for Dean to work his way through the various paperwork required to escape his voluntary prison. He wasn’t 100% yet, by any means. It would take considerably more than a few months to restore musculature lost over a decade. But he was well on the way to recovery. His limping gait was barely noticeable unless he let himself become overtired and as long as he continued his exercises, in time even that limp would fade completely.

So he didn’t need to wait for scripts to be issued. He didn’t need any medication. He had no aches or pains that couldn’t be handled with over-the-counter tablets.

By the time he and Sam left the hospital, Sam carrying Dean’s bag of clothing and Dean clutching only a printed list of exercises, Gabriel was already waiting outside, engine idling, huge shit-eating grin on his face.

Dean froze in place, his eyes blank with shock and emotion.

“What. The. Fuck?” he finally managed.

“Funny story,” Gabriel said, climbing out of the huge black car but leaving her purring on the asphalt. “When I asked Bobby if there was a car that I could borrow, he said I was shit out of luck. Turned out there was one that was long overdue to be returned to its owner though.”

Dean swallowed heavily.

“I… I don’t understand,” he admitted, his voice barely a whisper.

“You had other things on your mind at the time,” Sam took over, “so you probably don’t remember Ash saying Robert Singer lived in a salvage yard.”

He saw the penny drop immediately. “Singer Salvage,” Dean said. “The place I’ve been cutting checks to for years for her storage.”

“Turns out I wasn’t the only person who thought you were wasting money storing a wreck ,” Sam continued. “Bobby started to feel so guilty about the money he was charging you that he gradually started using the funds to restore her for you. Took him years to track down all the parts.”

“Weirdest part,” Gabriel interrupted, “was that he had no idea who you were when he was doing it. The Reaper never mentioned you to him at all until the whole Knights Of Hell stuff kicked off this year, by which time she was long finished, just waiting for him to get around to drop her off. He says he knew you were paralyzed in the accident and he was just trying to save you wasting your money. He just vaguely hoped you might finally agree to ‘sell the damned thing’ if she was restored. Now though, he thinks the Reaper always had a hand in awarding him the salvage contract that meant he was in place to pick her up in the first place.”

“Problem with _that_ idea, of course, is that he was awarded the contract before Chuck caused the accident. So that proves the Reaper knew it was going to happen, but did nothing to prevent it,” Sam added darkly.

Dean ignored them both, stepping forward and running a hand reverently over Baby’s hood. He thought seeing her like this, as spotless as the morning before the accident, should hurt even more than remembering the way she’d been as he’d been cut out of her, still covered in his father’s blood. But it didn’t. It just felt like a missing puzzle piece of his life unexpectedly being found and then seamlessly slipped back into place.

“It doesn’t make it right,” he muttered, knowing the Reaper wouldn’t hear him, wouldn’t even care if he did, but needing to say the words out loud regardless. “Fixing me, fixing Baby, it doesn’t undo anything. It doesn’t _erase_ what happened. People aren’t like that. Memories aren’t like that. You can’t just rub a magic eraser over everything and pretend it didn’t happen. The scars will always remain.”

“There’s a note for you in the glove compartment,” Gabriel said. 

“From Bobby?” Dean asked, climbing into the car and seating himself behind the steering wheel before reaching across the dash to retrieve the paper.

“I don’t think so. Not his style. I think it was written by the Reaper.”

Dean opened the folded paper and read the single word.

“ 金継ぎ. Kintsugi.”

He gasped and then choked as a lump rose in his throat and tears burned his eyes. He dropped his head to the steering wheel and his back heaved with silent sobs.

Before Sam could speak, Gabriel grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him away. “Leave him,” he urged. “Give him a few moments alone.”

“What the hell did the note say?”

“Kintsugi.”

“Which means what exactly?

“The art of precious scars,” Gabriel explained. “Kintsugi is the Japanese art of using gold to put broken pottery pieces back together. Embracing the flaws and imperfections, making them more obvious rather than less, in order to create an even more beautiful piece of art.”

Sam blinked in surprise. “But she’s been restored perfectly. Not a mark on her.”

“I don’t think he was referring to the car,” Gabriel replied. “How about you and I go find some coffee and snacks for the trip, huh?”

###

Although his mother griped about Gabriel and Sam’s ‘lack of manners’ in inviting themselves to spend Thanksgiving with them, Jimmy knew her well enough to recognize she was not genuinely annoyed but was, actually, quite possibly pleased about the development.

She definitely seemed to enjoy telling several people, when the subject of the holiday was raised, that she and Jimmy would be totally unavailable that day because they were ‘of course’ having a ‘large’ family gathering.

Certainly, she had the staff lay on a meal that probably would have been sufficient to serve a small third-world country.

He handed over control to Castiel, letting the Angel interrogate Naomi over the origins and purpose of the Thanksgiving celebration, whilst he himself considered the best opening gambit to take with Sam. 

The way he saw it, Sam’s co-operation was going to be critical if he was going to pull off getting Dean and Cas back together.

Because, realistically, that _was _what he was trying to do and, oddly, he had no feelings of bitterness about that despite his own sincere feelings for Dean. This was an unprecedented situation, for sure, and maybe he ought to feel like a third-wheel in their peculiar triangle, but that simply wasn’t the case. He _loved _Dean. He knew that was true, regardless of his mother’s efforts to convince him he was too inexperienced to really understand what love was.

She was actually probably right.

It was probably his whole inexperience of any form of romantic love that made this whole situation _better_. If he had ever experienced any form of Eros before, perhaps he would be less able to adjust to the idea that Dean’s affection for he, Jimmy, was never going to be as all-encompassing as his feelings for Castiel. Perhaps, then, his own emotions towards Dean were Agape after all. Unconditional love. Because he had no feelings of resentment over the idea that he was only the host body by which Castiel and Dean could experience a physical manifestation of their undoubted Eros.

What made it so much easier, of course, was that he loved Castiel too. How could he not? Castiel had given him his life back. But that wasn’t the only reason he cared. Loving Castiel for what he had given Jimmy was just a conditional love, an obligation, an insurance policy even. If that was the only reason he cared for the Angel, the emotion would be bogus.

But the truth was that Castiel had, over the last six months, become the most important person in Jimmy’s life. His best friend. He understood now why Sam and Gabriel could not bear to part from each other, even though their love was – they claimed - not of a physical nature.

Gabriel’s crude comment about them ‘sharing a litter box’, now made total sense to Jimmy.

Nothing, no relationship with _anyone_ else, could ever be closer than the one he and Castiel now shared. To have someone who knew _everything_ about you. Every deepest, darkest thought. Every secret desire. Every embarrassment. Every triumph. Who shared every sorrow and every joy. Who knew _everything_ and yet judged _nothing. _

Living as the host of an Angel was like taking every breath under the close omniscient view of God himself.

Well, not literally.

Jimmy didn’t necessarily believe in the existence of any higher power – well, except for the Reaper, obviously, and he was hardly a candidate for worship – so he wasn’t thinking of Castiel in a _spiritual _way. But as a child, when he’d been taught the Catholic dogma that god was always _watching_ him, the idea had been offered as a threat, rather than a comfort.

Don’t sin, because God is watching you.

Catholicism had been, in his personal experience, a religion of fear. He could remember feeling envy of Evangelics whose god was a loving, merciful one. Happy worshippers who sang ‘Jesus loves us’ with the carefree abandon of children. Who didn’t face endless sermons of the hellfire and brimstone that awaited any catholic boy who misstepped off the path of righteousness even a single iota because SIN would bring damnation and there was no avoiding hell because _GOD IS ALWAYS WATCHING._

Castiel was always watching.

But his gaze brought Jimmy comfort not fear.

Jimmy never felt judged by his Angel. Castiel offered him nothing but understanding, forgiveness, solidarity and… well, peace. The knowledge that no matter what he did, whatever mistakes he made, Castiel would always know the intention of his heart and would, therefore, forgive him.

So Jimmy loved Castiel. Loved him even more than he could ever love Dean. And, so, could he feel even the slightest hypocritical resentment that Dean loved Castiel more than Jimmy too? Of course not.

Maybe _that_ was the bottom line.

Jimmy was not the third-wheel in the Dean/Castiel love story, after all.

He and Dean were simply both sister-wives sharing their love of Castiel.

He snorted as the thought caused Castiel to break off his conversation with Naomi and say ‘_I DARE you to ever repeat that comment to Dean.”_

_“Maybe we just keep that one to ourselves,” _he suggested, biting his lower lip to prevent himself from laughing out loud.

The house phone rang and Naomi answered it. “ Yes, of course. They’re expected…..what? Really? You’re sure of his identity? How peculiar…. No….No, that’s fine. Just unexpected. But absolutely fine. Let them through,” she said, her face pursed in thought as she hung up.

“Sam and Gabe are here?” Jimmy asked her. “That’s a few hours earlier than expected. I’d better make sure the staff have gotten their rooms ready.”

“Tell Maria to prepare the Green Room too. They have apparently brought a ‘friend’,” she said, drolly. “Perhaps we should have taken out an advertisement opening our house to the entirety of the homeless population for the duration of the holiday.”

“The Green Room? Really? Have they brought the President?” he joked. The Green Room was a suite built over the left Annex of the house, a virtually self-contained private suite accessible from the main central stairwell but also having a private side-entrance with its own elevator. The last time Castiel remembered it being used was when the Clintons had stayed for a weekend.

“Go find Maria,” she said. “You know how snappy she gets about ‘surprises’. You deal with her whilst I greet our guests.”

Jimmy pouted slightly at being thwarted from his own urge to excitedly race outside to greet his ‘friends’, but his mother was right. The housekeeper _was_ liable to throw a minor tantrum about the necessity to urgently prepare the suite, which would cause her to utter a rapid flood of complaints in her mother tongue and his Spanish was far better than Naomi’s.

###

Marcel, their exceedingly snooty French butler ( who was actually named Sean and was a fourth generation Irish immigrant from Brooklyn rather than a Parisian but delighted in playing his role to the hilt ) blinked in offended surprise when Naomi charged past him ( as he was waiting, with the intention of hesitating a further several minutes after the doorbell was rung before opening the door with a studied look of distain ) and she opened the door herself before the visitors had even left their vehicle.

Hands on her hips, she glared at the driver of the huge black classic car that had just rolled to a halt.

“I always suspected you were a showman,” she drawled.

He grinned back at her, totally shamelessly, and said, “I heard you had pie.”

“I heard you were paraplegic,” she replied, as he opened the car door, swung his legs out easily and rose to his feet.

“Hopefully the pie rumor was more accurate,” he said, with a ridiculously charming smirk.

She turned to Sam and Gabriel as they too emerged from the black behemoth. “You two get inside and distract James. Dean, come with me. We need to talk.”

Without waiting for agreement to her demands, she stepped forward and snatched Dean by his right arm with surprisingly strong fingers and pulled him down the path with her towards the side of the mansion.

Stiff from the drive, he was limping enough that Naomi thought he’d probably appreciate the elevator even if he wasn’t using a chair anymore.

“So you’re hosting?” She asked, curiously.

“Nope. The Reaper threw me a quick freebie. Fixed my spine but then left me to do the rest myself. Still working on it,” he answered easily enough.

“Well, it was probably the least he owed you,” she accepted. “Tell me. Are you here for Castiel, or for my son?”

“Both,” he answered. “But, honestly, possibly Castiel _more_ than Jimmy. I dunno. It’s a complicated situation.”

“Indeed,” she agreed.

“I saw the updated advisory on Angelic gender identification from the Catholic Church,” Dean mentioned, with studied casualness. “I assume your hand was in that.”

She shrugged a nonchalant agreement.

“This house is not a _private _place, Dean. I have an obscene amount of staff. It’s impossible to keep such a ridiculously large property habitable without them though, and my late husband’s family were a stupidly pretentious bunch. I have to employ ten gardeners just to keep the lawn in check. I can’t wait for the day when I can retire from public life and move into a modern two-bedroom apartment in somewhere civilized like London. However, we work with what we have. My point, and it is a hugely salient one, is…”

“That I am officially here to see _Castiel?_” Dean suggested cynically.

“Exactly,” she agreed, nodding at him approvingly. “I knew you were smarter than you look.”

“Why does everyone _always_ say that to me?” Dean groaned.

“Because a boy being as pretty as you offends the world order,” Naomi snarked. “We therefore comfort ourselves by dismissing you as stupid. However, since you are _not _stupid, I expect you to heed my words. Unless you are in the private apartment I am having prepared for you as we speak, do not ever make the mistake of assuming anywhere within this house is private. Your ‘miraculous’ cure fits the necessary narrative, fortunately.”

“What narrative?” he demanded.

She held a hand up, flicking her fingers to silence him as she thought furiously. Then she said, “forgive me, I’m thinking on the fly here.”

“Yeah, I seem to do that a lot these days too,” he agreed dryly.

“Right, this is how we pitch it. We sell the idea that you were Castiel’s _former_ host. That will explain your ‘cure’, which will inevitably need some kind of explanation as soon as the wider public become aware of it because, obviously, the Reaper cannot be mentioned. It will give credence to a relationship between you and the Angel who ‘saved’ you. Just as Samuel and Gabriel have openly admitted they now have an unbreakable ‘platonic’ bond that, let’s face it, no-one really believes but at least pretends to accept, so you and Castiel can be accepted to be inseparable, even though he now resides within James.”

“Sam and Gabe really _are_ just friends,” Dean protested.

“Mmmm,” she hummed, clearly unconvinced.

“You do realize this whole narrative is a case of putting the cart before the horse, don’t you?” Dean protested. “Jimmy and I haven’t even talked about any of this yet.”

She shrugged. “I find most situations in life benefit from being handled from an anticipation of worst case scenario. At the very least, I wish you, Castiel and James to reunite in a totally private setting. What you choose to do after that may prove that my precautions are unnecessary. Should, however, you emerge from that room as a couple, or a triple, or whatever goddamned term needs to be coined for this totally bizarre situation, the _official _explanation is to be that you are _Castiel’s ‘_special friend’.”

“Alternatively, we could just be ‘out and proud’,” Dean suggested.

“Equally alternatively, I could get one of my aforementioned gardeners to dig a big hole under the Magnolias. No one would ever find your body.” She smirked at him unrepentantly.

“Woah,” Dean said. “You’re one scary lady.”

“Where my son’s health and happiness is concerned, I am probably your worst nightmare,” she agreed. “Remember that.”

Dean stopped walking and looked at her with softer eyes. “I swear I care for Jimmy. Probably too much. I don’t know how this will work out, Naomi, because the whole situation is fubar, but I swear I will never deliberately cause him any pain.”

Her own expression lightened and she patted his arm reassuringly. “I know. You’re a good man, Dean Winchester and I truly believe, well within our lifetime, there will come a time when I might be able to proudly call you, legitimately, my son-in-law. Perceptions and attitudes are softening, and I think you and James and the rest of your generation may be the catalysts for far more changes than simply the acceptance of the miracle of actual Angels living amongst us. These are interesting times.”

“The Chinese consider that a curse,” he pointed out.

She shrugged and laughed. “Everyone’s a critic.”

She led him to a doorway. “This leads to the elevator to the Green Room. Good luck, Mr. Winchester. I will leave you to it. Apparently I need to go check the kitchen staff have baked a sufficiency of pie.”

###

To say Jimmy _knew_ the identity of the mysterious visitor waiting in the Green Room would be a lie.

But, as he flew up the main staircase in that direction so swiftly that even Castiel’s wings couldn’t have gotten him there any faster, he was filled with so much _hope_ that he thought his heart might burst out of his chest and beat him there.

Why else would the visitor have entered the room via the elevator rather than by the front door?

Why else would Sam and Gabe be looking so damned smug?

Though his mother’s quiet acceptance of the situation _did_ give him a little pause for doubt.

Which was why, when he burst into the suite without knocking and saw the man standing with his back to him, staring out at the formal gardens of the mansion, his headlong rush stuttered to an abrupt, faltering stop.

He was expecting Dean. Dean in his wheelchair. Dean, vibrant and alive and _real, _finally smiling at him in the flesh_. _Not this stranger standing silently in the bay of the window, a dark shadow against the bright daylight.

And, even as the man turned, his face remained in shadow because the sun was behind him, blinding in its intensity.

Yet, even before his eyes adjusted against the glare, even before he _saw_ the man’s face he _knew._

His knees weakened with shock, with surprise, and it was abruptly too much to handle, too much to cope with, and he shrank back in his own head, begging for Castiel to take over before he fell to his knees in the soft carpet, before he made a total fool of himself by literally weeping with relief.

His eyes blazed, as Castiel moved into place, as he seamlessly accepted the reins of their body. And the voice that emerged from his mouth was a deep rumble as he said, “Hello, Dean.”

“Hey, Cas,” Dean said, stepping forward, his gait a little awkward as though the movement pained him. “Hi, Jimmy, “ he added. “It’s good to see you both looking so…. well.”

“It is surprising to see you looking so… tall,” Castiel replied, his tone slightly admonishing.

Dean blushed and dipped his head slightly. “I know. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“_THIS _is why you were comatose for so long?”

“I think so. It only felt like a few hours to me but it seems to have taken the Reaper that long to actually cure my injury. I guess he _must_ have implanted an aspect inside my body, but somehow removed it before I actually woke up in the hospital.”

“I imagine it slipped out of you via the life support equipment,” Castiel said. “In our natural form, we can move easily throughout electronic wiring. Why did you not contact us before last week, Dean? You awakened months ago. Were we of no import to you at all?”

Dean stiffened defensively. “I was kinda busy. Little matter of learning how to walk again, ya know?”

Castiel’s eyes blazed hotter with the deflection. He opened his mouth but it was Jimmy who rushed forward to speak. “He’s not angry. He’s hurt,” Jimmy told Dean quickly. “He’s trapped here, in a strange and terrifying world. He needed you, Dean, and you refused even to accept a telephone call. And we both thought it was because of your stupid hang up about your paralysis and now we find out it wasn’t even true anymore.”

“Stupid? Was it stupid to want you _both_ to end up with someone who actually had the ability to live more than a half-life?”

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “But it wasn’t even still the case, was it? Even if you still needed to ‘learn how to walk again’ the promise of it was there. The situation was already completely different. And Castiel _needed _you.”

“Why did he need me?” Dean demanded angrily. “He has _you. _You have each other. You’re Jimmy Fucking Novak. Media darling. Son of the woman everybody is saying will be the next goddamned President. Why the hell would _either _of you need _me?”_

_“_Ohhh,” Jimmy said, his heart breaking as he saw the defeated expression in Dean’s eyes. “Is that why? Of course, that’s why. Oh, Dean, you idiot. In fact, we’re _all _idiots. I didn’t think. _WE_ didn’t think. We both forgot who you were, didn’t we? All we saw, all we remembered was the hero who saved us all. We forgot the man. We shouldn’t have listened to Sam and Gabe. We should have flown down anyway to show you how much you mean to us; but it honestly never occurred to us that you didn’t _know. _How can you even be real, Dean? How can you have done all that you have done and _still_ not believe yourself worthy of love?”

Dean flinched.

“Damnit, Jimmy, don’t you understand it’s because I love you, love _both_ of you, that I know you both deserve better than me? That it’s only selfishness that’s driven me to hope you might not have come to the same conclusion.”

Castiel moved forward again, gently pushing Jimmy aside. “I believe you overestimate the appeal of a hosted Angel,” he said, wryly. “Besides, you are the only person who will ever truly see both Jimmy and myself as distinct individuals. Who else knew and learned to care for both of us separately? As for us, who could possibly ever compete for our affection? Even should you choose to reject us, we shall never choose another in your place. Both Jimmy and I are determined that will be the case. If you leave here, without us, then we will remain alone. In refusing us _your _love, you will remove any possibility that we will ever experience an external relationship.”

“Pressure, much, huh?” Dean snorted.

“A human I know, for whom I care very much, taught me that it is necessary in war to utilize whatever tactics are necessary to assure victory,” Castiel said.

“War?” Dean queried.

“Is this not a battle for your heart?” Castiel countered.

“You already won that battle a long time ago, Cas. But what about Jimmy? I can’t… look I _care_ for Jimmy but… but it…”

“Isn’t the same,” Jimmy interrupted. “I know, Dean. But that’s fine because, well, I kinda love Castiel more than you, anyway.”

Dean blinked at him in surprise. “Huh?”

“This can work, this _will_ work, because all _three_ of us truly care for each other. Love isn’t measured in degrees anyway, is it? You fell in love with Castiel, who always looked like _me. _So there’s _that… _Plus I would dare go so far as to say you _do _love me. But you simply love Castiel _more. _And I get that, because I feel the same way about him. So if, for this to work between us, I always need to let Castiel take the reins when we are ‘together’, then that’s fine. I still get to have you, don’t I? We’re all winners.”

“But that’s not fair on you, is it?” Dean protested.

“I’ll thank you to give me the courtesy of believing I am an adult capable of deciding for myself what I do or do not consider ‘fair’,” Jimmy retorted. “This is what I want, Dean, and it gives both you and Castiel what _you_ both want. So where’s the problem?”

Dean shook his head slowly. “No, it’s not… not…”

Jimmy stepped forward, almost aggressively, his movement forcing Dean back against the window until his body was aligned against Dean’s, pressing against him, their groins touching closely enough that it was obvious that Jimmy was turned on.

“Can you feel that?” he demanded angrily. “That’s _me_, Dean. My body. My feelings of attraction to you. That’s _all_ me. I’m twenty-nine years old. And let me put that in context for you. I was raised Catholic. Do you know that Catholics even consider _masturbation_ to be a sin? And even if that wasn’t the case, I spent most of my life too ill to do anything about it anyway. But that doesn’t make the reality that I have _never _experienced any form of sexual release any less true.”

Dean gaped at him in near horror.

“Yes,” Jimmy agreed, nodding firmly. “Exactly. And don’t even pretend that hasn’t just made you react, because I can feel you, Dean. So I know how much the thought of that turns you on. That I’m not only a virgin but literally so damned frustrated that I could explode here and now. And that’s _my _body you’re reacting to. _My _arousal. So do you _really_ think I give a damn if it is Castiel’s name you call when you finally give me the release I am aching for?”

Jimmy’s eyes flared electric blue once more. “I do not mind if you call Jimmy’s name instead,” he pointed out helpfully. “In my prior form, moving within the metadata of Moondoor, I effectively existed for the equivalent of millennia. Therefore my own claim of virginity could be considered to exceed Jimmy’s by several thousand years. I too feel extremely frustrated and would appreciate some relief should you feel so inclined.”

“I thought you were asexual,” Dean pointed out weakly, rubbing his lower back and wishing he’d let Sam do some of the driving after all because, unbelievably, it seemed that he was being offered what he wanted, what he had barely even dared hope for, but he didn’t actually feel physically able to go through with it. It was as though life, or fate, was still screwing with him.

Castiel shrugged. “I did not have the necessary context to translate love into sexual desire. Now I am residing within Jimmy’s flesh, I have been suddenly educated.” He deliberately ground Jimmy’s groin against Dean’s. “See?” He said, with satisfaction. “I now know how it _feels_ to have desire. And, unless I am greatly mistaken, to be desired in return. Gabriel was correct. It _is _a remarkably enjoyable sensation.”

“Woah. I’m getting tag-teamed,” Dean protested weakly, wishing his damned back wasn’t hurting so much that his primary wish was to sit down, rather than follow through on his cock’s eager reaction to the teasing.

“Is it working?” Jimmy asked hopefully. “Because I would really, really, _really, _like it if you decided this was a good moment to show Castiel how much you love him. Have you seen the bed in this room? The last person who got lucky in here was Bill Clinton.”

Dean’s face screwed up in distaste. “Not a visual I needed,” he said. “Anyway, you’re both barking up the wrong tree if you think this is going to end up like a cheap porn movie with us bouncing around that bed doing gymnastics. I only checked out of hospital this morning and that drive just about killed me. The only thing I really want to do right now is get some sleep before it’s turkey and pie time.”

“We have much to be thankful for,” Castiel said. “I like this idea of sharing a Thanksgiving meal.”

Jimmy’s expression softened. “I do too. And I think the idea of a restorative nap before dinner sounds wonderful, Dean.”

“Together,” Castiel demanded. “A sleep _together.”_

_“_Well, of course _together,” _Jimmy agreed.

“Sleep. Turkey. Pie. Sleep,” Castiel suggested. “And then sex.”

“Yes,” Jimmy agreed.

“Um… do I even get a say in this?” Dean asked.

“No,” Jimmy smirked.

“No,” Castiel agreed, his voice so deep and firm that it sent a shiver of anticipation through Dean’s body.

Dean looked at them, at the single face of the two people he loved, and considered the long and impossible journey that had brought all three of them to this point. Kintsugi, he thought. The Reaper was right. It was in their trials, their experiences, their pain and their losses that they had become who they were; the scars they bore, both visible and internal, were the roadmap of how they had all found strength and, together, they formed a rare and perfect new form of beauty.

The art of precious scars.

Because what better example of the unique beauty of Kintsugi could possibly exist than this bizarre but wonderful relationship that would evolve between them?

“Okay,” he agreed. “Sounds like a plan.”


End file.
